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4875      Colvln 
"~C7S      Landor . 
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igngltBl)  ilten  of  Cettera 

EDITED  BY  JOHN  MORLEY 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR 


Xanbor 


by 


SIDNEY     COLVIN,    M.A 

AUTHOR  OF 
"ALBERT  DURER  "  "KEATS"  "  FLAXftlAN  "  ETC. 


Englisb  /iDen  of  Xetters 

EDITED  BY 

JOHN    MORLEY 


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PREFATORY  NOTE. 

The  standard  and  indispensable  authority  on  the  life  of  Lander  is 
the  work  of  the  late  Mr.  John  Forster,  viz. : 

1.  Forster,  John :  Walter  Savage  Landor,  a  Biography,  London, 

Chapman  and  Hall;  first  edition  in  2  vols.,  1869;   second 
edition,  abridged,  forming  vol.  i.  of  the  collected  "  Life  and 
Works  of  Walter  Savage  Landor"  in  8  vols.,  18*76. 
Mr.  Forster  was  appointed  by  Landor  himself  as  his  literary  exec- 
utor ;  he  had  command  of  all  the  necessary  materials  for  his  task, 
and  his  book  is  written  with  knowledge,  industry,  afEection,  and  loy- 
alty of  purpose.     But  it  is  cumbrous  in  comment,  inconclusive  in 
criticism,  and  vague  on  vital  points,  especially  on  points  of  bibliog- 
raphy, which  in  the  case  of  Landor  are  frequently  both  interesting 
and  obscure.     The  student  of  Landor  must  supplement  the  work  of 
Mr.  Forster  from  other  sources,  of  which  the  principal  are  the  fol- 
lowing : 

2.  Hunt,  J.  E.  Leigh,  Lord  Byron  and  his  Contemporaries.     Lon- 

don, 182Y. 

3.  Blessington,  Marguerite,  Countess  of.  The  Idler  in  Italy,  2  vols. 

London,  1839.  Lady  Blessington's  first  impressions  of  Lan- 
dor are  reported  in  vol.  ii.  of  the  above ;  her  correspondence 
with  him,  and  an  Imaginary  Conversation  by  Landor  not  else- 
where reprinted,  will  be  found  in 

4.  Madden,  R.  R.,  The  Literary  Life  and  Correspondence  of  the 

Countess  of  Blessington,  3  vols.     London,  1855. 
6.  The  New  Spirit  of  the  Age,  edited  by  R.  H.  Home.     2  vols. 

London,  1844.     The  article  on  Landor  in  vol.  i.  of  the  above 

is  by  Miss  Barrett,  afterwards  Mrs.  Browning,  supplemented 

by  the  editor. 
6.  Emerson,  R.  W.,  English  Traits.     London,  1856. 


vi  PREFATORY  NOTE. 

*J.  Field,  Kate,  Last  Days  of  Walter  Savage  Landor,  a  series  of 
three  articles  in  the  Atlantic  Monthly  Magazine  for  1866. 

8.  Robinson,  H.  Crabbe,  Diary,  Reminiscences,  and  Correspondence 

of,  edited  by  Thomas  Sadler,  3  vols.     London,  1869. 

9.  Dickens,  Charles :  A  short  article  on  Forster's  "  Biography  "  in 

All  the  Year  Round  for  1869,  supplementing  with  some  strik- 
ing physiognomic  touches  the  picture  of  Landor  drawn  by  the 
same  hand  in  "  Bleak  House  "  (see  below,  p.  1^8). 

10.  Linton,  Mrs.  E.  Lynn :  Reminiscences  of  Walter  Savage  Landor, 

in  Eraser's  Magazine  for  July,  1870 ;  by  far  the  best  account 
of  the  period  of  Landor's  life  to  which  it  refers. 

11.  Houghton,  Lord :  Monographs.     London,  1873. 

I  forbear  to  enumerate  the  various  articles  on  Landor  and  his 
works  which  I  have  consulted  in  reviews  and  magazines  between  the 
dates  1798  and  1870 ;  several  of  the  most  important  are  mentioned 
in  the  text.  In  addition  to  the  materials  which  exist  in  print,  I  have 
had  the  advantage  of  access  to  some  unpublished.  To  Mr.  Robert 
Browning  in  particular  my  thanks  are  due  for  his  great  kindness  in 
allowing  me  to  make  use  of  the  collection  of  books  and  manuscripts 
left  him  by  Landor,  including  Landor's  own  annotated  copies  of  some 
of  his  rarest  writings,  and  a  considerable  body  of  his  occasional  jot- 
tings and  correspondence.  Mr.  Augustus  J.  C.  Hare  was  also  good 
enough  to  put  into  my  hands  a  number  of  letters  written  by  Landor 
to  his  father  and  to  himself.  To  Lord  Houghton  I  am  indebted  for 
help  of  various  kinds,  and  to  Mr.  Swinburne  for  his  most  friendly 
pains  in  looking  through  the  sheets  of  my  work,  and  for  many  valu- 
able suggestions  and  corrections. 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER  I. 

rkQH 

Birth  ajjd  Parentage — School — College       ....      1 


CHAPTER  II. 
Experiments  in  Life  and  Poetry — Gebir        .  .18 

CHAPTER  in. 

More  Experiments  and  Marriage — Bath — Spain — Llanthont 
— Count  Julian 41 

CHAPTER  IV. 

Life  at  Tours — Como — Pisa — Idyllia  Heroica      .        .        .    1^ 

CHAPTER  V. 

Life  at  Florence — The  Imaginary  Conversations         .        .     98 

CHAPTER  VI. 

FiESOLE  AND  England — The  Examination  op  Shakspeare — 

Pericles  and  Aspasia — The  Pentameron  .        .         .  133 


viii  CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER  Vn. 

PAGB 

Life  at  Bath— Dramas — Hellenics — Last  Fruit — Dry  Sticks.  IVI 

CHAPTER  Vm. 
Second  Exile  and  Last  Days — Heroic  Ljyls — Peath    .        .  206 

CHAPTER  EX. 
Conclusion      .        .  ....  217 


LANDO  R. 

CHAPTER  I. 

BIRTH    AND    PARENTAGE — SCHOOL — COLLBGB. 
[1115—1194:.] 

Few  men  have  ever  impressed  their  peers  so  much,  or  the 
general  public  so  little,  as  Walter  Savage  Landor.  Of 
all  celebrated  authors,  he  has  hitherto  been  one  of  the 
least  popular.  Nevertheless  he  is  among  the  most  strik- 
ing figures  in  the  history  of  English  literature ;  striking 
alike  by  his  character  and  his  powers.  Personally,  Landor 
exercised  the  spell  of  genius  upon  every  one  who  came 
near  him.  His  gifts,  attainments,  impetuosities,  his  origi- 
nality, his  force,  his  charm,  were  all  of  the  same  conspic- 
uous and  imposing  kind.  Not  to  know  what  is  to  be 
known  of  so  remarkable  a  man  is  evidently  to  be  a  loser. 
Not  to  be  familiar  with  the  works  of  so  noble  a  writer  is 
to  be  much  more  of  a  loser  still. 

The  place  occupied  by  Landor  among  English  men  of 
letters  is  a  place  apart.  He  wrote  on  many  subjects  and 
in  many  forms,  and  was  strong  both  in  imagination  and  in 
criticism.  He  was  equally  master  of  Latin  and  English, 
and  equally  at  home  in  prose  and  verse.  He  cannot  prop- 
1* 


2  LANDOR.  [chap. 

erly  be  associated  with  any  given  school,  or,  indeed,  with 
any  given  epoch,  of  our  literature,  as  epochs  are  usually 
counted,  but  stands  alone,  alike  by  the  character  of  his 
mind  and  by  the  tenour  and  circumstances  of  his  life. 
It  is  not  easy  to  realize  that  a  veteran  who  survived  to 
receive  the  homage  of  Mr.  Swinburne  can  have  been 
twenty-five  years  old  at  the  death  of  Cowper,  and  forty- 
nine  at  the  death  of  Byron.  Such,  however,  was  the  case 
of  Landor.  It  is  less  than  seventeen  years  since  he  died, 
and  less  than  eighteen  since  he  published  his  last  book ; 
his  first  book  had  been  published  before  Buonaparte  was 
consul.  His  literary  activity  extended,  to  be  precise,  over 
a  period  of  sixty-eight  years  (1795 — 1863).  Neither  was 
his  career  more  remarkable  for  its  duration  than  for  its 
proud  and  consistent  independence.  It  was  Landor's 
strength  as  well  as  his  weakness  that  he  was  all  his  life 
a  law  to  himself,  writing  in  conformity  with  no  standards 
and  in  pursuit  of  no  ideals  but  his  own. 

So  strong,  indeed,  was  this  instinct  of  originality  in 
Landor  that  he  declines  to  fall  in  with  the  thoughts  or 
to  repeat  the  words  of  others  even  when  to  do  so  would 
be  most  natural.  Though  an  insatiable  and  retentive 
reader,  in  his  own  writing  he  does  not  choose  to  deal  in  the 
friendly  and  commodious  currency  of  quotation,  allusion, 
and  reminiscence.  Everything  he  says  must  be  his  own, 
and  nothing  but  his  own.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  no  part 
of  Landor's  originality  to  provoke  attention,  as  many  even 
of  illustrious  writers  have  done,  by  emphasis  or  singularity 
of  style.  Arbitrary  and  vehement  beyond  other  men  in 
many  of  his  thoughts,  in  their  utterance  he  is  always 
sober  and  decorous.  He  delivers  himself  of  whatever  is 
in  his  mind  with  an  air,  to  borrow  an  expression  of  his 
own,  "  majestically    sedate."     Again,  although    in   saying 


I.]  BIRTH  AND  PAREXTAGE.  8 

what  he  chooses  to  say,  Landor  is  one  of  the  clearest  and 
most  direct  of  writers,  it  is  his  pleasure  to  leave  much 
unsaid  of  that  which  makes  ordinary  writing  easy  and 
eflEective.  He  is  so  anxious  to  avoid  saying  what  is  su- 
perfluous that  he  does  not  always  say  what  is  necessary. 
As  soon  as  he  has  given  adequate  expression  to  any  idea, 
he  leaves  it  and  passes  on  to  the  next,  forgetting  some- 
times to  make  clear  to  the  reader  the  connexion  of  his 
ideas  with  one  another. 

These  qualities  of  unbending  originality,  of  lofty  self- 
control,  and  of  deliberate  parsimony  in  utterance,  are 
evidently  not  the  qualities  to  carry  the  world  by  storm. 
Neither  did  Landor  expect  to  carry  the  world  by  storm. 
He  wrote  less  for  the  sake  of  pleasing  others  than  himself. 
He  addressed  a  scanty  audience  while  he  lived,  but  looked 
forward  with  confidence  to  one  that  should  be  more  nu- 
merous in  the  future,  although  not  very  numerous  even 
then.  "  I  shall  dine  late ;  but  the  dining-room  will  be 
well-lighted,  the  guests  few  and  select."  In  the  meantime 
Landor  contented  himself  with  the  applause  he  had,  and 
considering  whence  that  applause  came,  he  had,  indeed, 
good  reason  to  be  content.  His  early  poem  of  Gebir  was 
the  delight  first  of  Southey  and  afterwards  of  Shelley, 
who  at  college  used  to  declaim  it  with  an  enthusiasm 
which  disconcerted  his  friends,  and  which  years  did  not 
diminish.  The  admiration  of  Southey  for  Landor's  poetry 
led  the  way  to  an  ardent  and  lasting  friendship  between 
the  two  men.  By  Wordsworth  Landor  was  regarded  less 
warmly  than  by  Southey,  yet  with  a  respect  which  he  ex- 
tended to  scarcely  any  other  writer  of  his  time.  Hazlitt, 
who  loved  Wordsworth  little  and  Southey  less,  and  on 
whose  dearest  predilections  Landor  unsparingly  tram- 
pled, nevertheless  acknowledged  the  force  of  his  genius. 


4  LANDOR.  [chap. 

Charles  Lamb  was  at  one  time  as  great  a  reader  and 
quoter  of  GeJnr  as  Shelley  himself,  and  at  another  could 
not  dismiss  from  his  mind  or  lips  the  simple  cadences  of 
one  of  Landor's  elegies.  De  Quincey  declared  that  his 
Count  Julian  was  a  creation  worthy  to  take  rank  beside  the 
Prometheus  of  -^schylus,  or  Milton's  Satan.  As  the  suc- 
cessive volumes  of  his  Imaginary  Conversations  appeared, 
they  seemed  to  some  of  the  best  minds  of  the  time  to  con- 
tain masterpieces  almost  unprecedented  not  only  of  Eng- 
lish composition,  but  of  insight,  imagery,  and  reflection. 
The  society  of  their  author  was  sought  and  cherished  by 
the  most  distinguished  of  his  countrymen.  The  members 
of  the  scholar  family  of  Hare,  and  those  of  the  warrior 
family  of  Napier,  were  among  his  warmest  admirers  and 
closest  friends.  Coming  down  to  a  generation  of  which 
the  survivors  are  still  with  us,  Dickens,  Carlyle,  Emerson, 
Lord  Houghton,  Robert  and  Elizabeth  Browning  have  been 
among  those  who  have  delighted  to  honour  him ;  and  the 
list  might  be  brought  down  so  as  to  include  names  of  all 
degrees  of  authority  and  standing.  While  the  multitude 
has  ignored  Landor,  he  has  been  for  three  generations  teach- 
ing and  charming  those  who  in  their  turn  have  taught  and 
charmed  the  multitude. 

By  his  birthplace,  as  he  loved  to  remember,  Landor  was 
a  neighbour  of  the  greatest  English  poets.  He  was  born 
at  Warwick  on  the  30th  of  January,  1775.  He  was  proud 
of  his  lineage,  and  fond  of  collecting  evidences  of  its 
antiquity.  His  family  had,  in  fact,  been  long  one  of  prop- 
erty and  position  in  Staffordshire.  He  believed  that  it 
had  originally  borne  the  name  of  Del-a  La'nd  or  De  la 
Laundes,  and  that  its  descent  could  be  traced  back  for 
seven  hundred  years ;  for  about  half  that  time,  said  his 
less  credulous  or  less  imaginative  brother.     What  is  cep 


I,]  BIRTH  AND  PARENTAGE.  5 

tain  is  that  some  of  the  Staffordshire  Landors  had  made 
themselves  heard  of  in  the  wars  of  King  and  Parliament. 
A  whig  Landor  had  been  high  sheriff  of  the  county  at 
the  Kevolution  of  1688;  his  grandson,  on  the  other  hand, 
was  a  marked  man  for  his  leanings  towards  the  house  of 
Stuart.  A  son  of  this  Jacobite  Landor  being  head  of  the 
family  in  the  latter  part  of  the  last  century,  was  at  the 
same  time  engaged  in  the  practice  of  medicine  at  War- 
wick. This  Dr.  Landor  was  Walter  Savage  Lander's 
father. 

Of  Dr.  Landor  the  accounts  which  have  reached  us  are  not 
suflBcient  to  convey  any  very  definite  image.  His  memory 
survives  only  as  that  of  a  polished,  sociable,  agreeable,  some- 
■what  choleric  gentleman,  more  accomplished  and  better 
educated,  as  his  profession  required,  than  most  of  those 
with  whom  he  associated,  but  otherwise  dining,  coursing, 
telling  his  story  and  drinking  his  bottle  without  particular 
distinction  among  the  rest.  Lepidus,  doctus,  liberalis,  pro- 
bus,  amicis  jucundissimus — these  are  the  titles  selected  for 
his  epitaph  by  his  sons  Walter  and  Robert,  both  of  them 
men  exact  in  weighing  words.  Dr.  Landor  was  twice  mar- 
ried, first  to  a  Miss  Wright  of  Warwick,  and  after  her 
death  to  Elizabeth  Savage,  of  the  Warwickshire  family 
of  the  Savages  of  Tachbrook.  By  his  first  wife  he  had 
six  children,  all  of  whom,  however,  died  in  infancy  except 
one  daughter.  By  his  second  wife  he  had  three  sons  and 
four  daughters ;  and  of  this  second  family  Walter  Savage 
Landor  was  the  eldest  bom.  Both  the  first  and  the  second 
wives  of  Dr.  Landor  were  heiresses  in  their  degree.  The 
fortune  of  the  first  devolved  by  settlement  upon  her  sur- 
viving daughter,  who  was  in  due  time  married  to  a  cousin, 
Humphrey  Arden  of  Longcroft.  The  family  of  the  sec- 
ond, that  of  the  Savages  of  Tachbrook,  was  of  better  cer- 


6  LANDOR.  [chap. 

tified  antiquity  and  distinction  than  his  own,  though  the 
proofs  by  which  Walter  Savage  Landor  used  to  associate 
with  it  certain  historical  personages  bearing  the  same  name 
were  of  a  somewhat  shadowy  nature.  The  father  of  Eliza- 
beth Savage  had  been  lineally  the  head  of  his  house ;  but 
the  paternal  inheritance  which  she  divided  with  her  three 
sisters  was  not  considerable — the  family  estates  having 
passed,  it  seems,  into  the  hands  of  two  of  her  grand- 
uncles,  men  of  business  in  London.  By  these  there  was  be- 
queathed to  her,  after  her  marriage  with  Dr.  Landor,  prop- 
erty to  the  value  of  nearly  eighty  thousand  pounds,  con- 
sisting of  the  two  estates  of  Ipsley  Court  and  Tachbrook 
in  Warwickshire,  the  former  on  the  borders  of  Worcester- 
shire, the  latter  close  to  Leamington,  together  with  a  share 
of  the  reversionary  interest  in  a  third  estate  —  that  of 
Hughenden  Manor  in  Buckinghamshire  —  of  which  the 
name  has  since  become  familiar  to  us  from  other  associ- 
ations. The  Warwickshire  properties  thus  left  to  Mrs. 
Landor,  as  well  as  Dr.  Landor's  own  family  property  in 
Staffordshire,  were  strictly  entailed  upon  the  eldest  male 
issue  of  the  marriage ;  so  that  to  these  united  possessions 
Walter  Savage  Landor  was  born  heir. 

No  one,  it  should  seem,  ever  entered  life  under  happier 
conditions.  To  the  gifts  of  breeding  and  of  fortune  there 
were  added  at  his  birth  the  gifts  of  genius  and  of  strength. 
But  there  had  been  evil  godmothers  beside  the  cradle  as 
well  as  good,  and  in  the  composition  of  this  powerful  nat- 
ure pride,  anger,  and  precipitancy  had  been  too  largely 
mixed,  to  the  prejudice  of  a  noble  intellect  and  tender 
heart,  and  to  the  disturbance  of  all  his  relations  with  his 
fellow-men.  Of  his  childhood  no  minute  record  has  come 
down  to  us.  It  seems  to  have  been  marked  by  neither 
the  precocities  nor  the  infirmities  of  genius.     Indeed,  al- 


1.]  BIRTH  AND  PARENTAGE.  7 

thouo^h  in  after-life  Landor  used  often  to  complain  of  ail- 
ments,  of  serious  infirmities  he  knew  little  all  his  days. 
His  mother,  whose  love  for  her  children  was  solicitous  and 
prudent  rather  than  passionate  or  very  tender,  only  once 
had  occasion  for  anxiety  as  to  the  health  of  her  eldest  born. 
This  was  when  he  was  seized,  in  his  twelfth  year,  with  a 
violent  attack,  not  of  any  childish  malady,  but  of  gout ; 
an  attack  which  the  boy  endured,  it  is  said,  with  clamor- 
ous resentment  and  impatience;  and  which  never  after- 
wards returned. 

He  had  been  sent  as  a  child  of  only  four-and-a-half  to 
a  school  at  Knowle,  ten  miles  from  home.  Here  he  stayed 
five  years  or  more,  until  he  was  old  enough  to  go  to  Rug- 
by. His  holidays  were  spent  between  his  father's  profes- 
sional abode  in  the  town  of  Warwick  and  one  or  other 
of  the  two  country  houses  on  the  Savage  estates — Ipsley 
Court  and  Tachbrook.  To  these  homes  of  his  boyhood 
Landor  was  accustomed  all  his  life  to  look  back  with  the 
most  aflEectionate  remembrance.  He  had  a  retentive  mem- 
ory for  places,  and  a  great  love  of  trees  and  flowers.  The 
mulberries,  cedars,  and  fig-trees  of  the  Warwick  garden, 
the  nut-walk  and  apricots  of  Tachbrook,  afforded  him  joys 
which  he  never  afterwards  forgot.  Of  Warwick  he  writes, 
in  his  seventy-eighth  year,  that  he  has  just  picked  up  from 
the  gravel  walk  the  two  first  mulberries  that  have  fallen,  a 
thing  he  remembers  having  done  just  seventy  years  before ; 
and  of  Tachbrook,  in  his  seventy-seventh,  "  Well  do  I  re- 
member it  from  my  third  or  fourth  year ;  and  the  red  fil- 
bert at  the  top  of  the  garden,  and  the  apricots  from  the 
barn  wall,  and  Aunt  Nancy  cracking  the  stones  for  me. 
If  I  should  ever  eat  apricots  with  you  again,  I  shall  not 
now  cry  for  the  kernel."  For  Ipsley  and  its  encircling 
stream  the  pleasantest  expression  of  Lander's  affection  is 


8  LANDOR.  [chap. 

contained  in  some  unpublished  verses,  which  may  find  their 
place  here,  although  they  refer  to  a  later  period  of  his 
youth : 

"  I  hope  in  vain  to  see  again 
Ipsley's  peninsular  domain. 
In  youth  'twas  there  I  used  to  scare 

A  whirring  bird  or  scampering  hare, 
And  leave  my  book  within  a  nook 

Where  alders  lean  above  the  brook, 
To  walk  beyond  the  third  mill-pond, 
And  meet  a  maiden,  fair  and  fond, 
Expecting  me  beneath  a  tree 

Of  shade  for  two  but  not  for  three. 
Ah !  my  old  yew,  far  out  of  view, 
Why  must  I  bid  you  both  adieu?" 

This  love  of  trees,  flowers,  and  places,  went  along  in  the 
boy  with  a  love  of  books.  He  was  proficient  in  school 
exercises,  all  except  arithmetic,  an  art  which,  "  according 
to  the  method  in  use,"  he  never  succeeded  in  mastering. 
At  Rugby,  where  he  went  at  ten,  he  was  soon  among  the 
best  Latin  scholars ;  and  he  has  recorded  his  delight  over 
the  first  purchase  of  English  books  he  made  with  his  owu 
money ;  the  books  in  question  being  Drayton's  Polyolhion 
and  Baker's  Chronicle.  He  tells  elsewhere  how  the  writer 
who  first  awoke  in  him  the  love  of  poetry  was  Cowper. 
He  seems  from  the  first  to  have  been  a  greedy  reader,  even 
to  the  injury  of  his  power  of  sleep.  "  I  do  not  remem- 
ber," he  writes  among  his  unpublished  jottings,  "  that  I 
ever  slept  five  hours  consecutively,  rarely  four,  even  in 
boyhood.  I  was  much  of  a  reader  of  night,  and  was  once 
flogged  for  sleeping  at  the  evening  lesson,  which  I  had 
learnt,  but  having  mastered  it,  I  dozed." 

This  bookish  boy  was  at  the  same  time  physically  strong 
and  active,  though  not  particularly  dexterous.     Dancing, 


I]  SCHOOL.  9 

to  his  own  great  chagrin,  he  could  never  learn,  and  on 
horseback  his  head  was  too  full  of  thoughts  to  allow  him 
much  to  mind  his  riding.  At  boxing,  cricket,  and  foot- 
ball he  could  hold  his  own  well.  But  the  sport  he  loved 
was  fishing  with  a  cast-net ;  at  this  he  was  really  skilful, 
and  apt  in  the  pursuit  to  break  bounds  and  get  into  trou- 
ble. One  day  he  was  reported  for  having  flung  his  net 
over,  and  victoriously  held  captive,  a  farmer  who  tried  to 
interfere  with  his  pastime ;  another  day,  for  having  ex- 
torted a  nominal  permission  to  fish  where  he  had  no  sort 
of  business  from  a  passing  butcher,  who  had  no  sort  of 
authority  to  give  it.  A  fag,  whose  unlucky  star  he  had 
chosen  all  one  afternoon  to  regard  as  the  cause  of  his  bad 
sport,  remembered  all  his  life  Landor's  sudden  change  of 
demeanour,  and  his  own  poignant  relief,  when  the  taking  of 
a  big  fish  convinced  him  that  the  said  star  was  not  unlucky 
after  all.  Like  many  imaginative  boys  to  whose  summer 
musings  the  pools  and  shallows  of  English  lowland  streams 
have  seemed  as  full  of  romance  as  Eurotas  or  Scamander, 
he  loved  nothing  so  well  as  to  wander  by  the  brook-side, 
sometimes  with  a  sporting,  but  sometimes  also  with  a 
studious  intent.  He  recalls  these  pleasures  in  a  retrospec- 
tive poem  of  his  later  years,  Ow  Swift  joining  Avon  near 
Rugby  : 

"  In  youth  how  often  at  thy  side  I  wander'd ; 
What  golden  hours,  hours  numberless,  were  squander'd 

Among  thy  sedges,  while  sometimes 

I  meditated  native  rhymes, 
And  sometimes  stumbled  upon  Latian  feet ; 

There,  where  soft  mole-built  seat 

Invited  me,  I  noted  down 

What  must  full  surely  win  the  crown ; 

But  first  impatiently  vain  efforts  made 

On  broken  pencil  with  a  broken  blade." 
B 


10  LANDOR.  [chap. 

Again,  one  of  the  most  happily  turned  of  all  Lander's 
Latin  poems  expresses  his  regret  that  his  eldest  son,  born 
in  Italy,  will  never  learn  to  know  and  love  the  English 
streams  which  had  been  the  delight  of  his  own  youth. 
And  once  more,  he  records  how  the  subject  of  that  most 
perfect  of  dramatic  dialogues,  Leofric  and  Godiva,  had 
first  occupied  him  as  a  boy.  He  had  written  a  little  poem 
on  the  subject  as  he  sat  by  the  square  pool  at  Rugby — 
"  May  the  peppermint  still  be  growing  on  the  bank  in  that 
place !" — and  he  remembers  the  immoderate  laughter  with 
which  his  attempt  was  received  by  the  friend  to  whom  he 
confided  it,  and  his  own  earnestness  in  beseeching  that 
friend  not  to  tell  the  lads — "so  heart-strickenly  and  des- 
perately was  I  ashamed." 

Landor,  it  thus  appears,  had  acquired  in  his  earliest 
school  days  the  power  and  the  habit,  which  remained  with 
him  until  almost  the  hour  of  his  death,  of  writing  verses 
for  his  own  pleasure  both  in  Latin  and  English.  As  re- 
gards Latin,  he  is  the  one  known  instance  in  which  the 
traditional  classical  education  of  our  schools  took  full 
effect,  and  was  carried  out  to  its  furthest  practical  conse- 
quences. Not  only  did  Latin  become  in  boyhood  and 
remain  to  the  last  a  second  mother  tongue  to  him ;  his 
ideal  of  behaviour  at  the  same  time  modelled  itself  on  the 
ancient  Roman,  and  that  not  alone  in  things  convenient. 
Not  content  with  taking  Cato  or  Scipio  or  Brutus  for  his 
examples,  when  he  was  offended  he  instinctively  betook 
himself  to  the  weapons  of  Catullus  and  Martial.  Now  a 
schoolboy's  alcaics  and  hendecasyllabics  may  be  never  so 
well  turned,  but  if  their  substance  is  both  coarse  and  sav- 
age, and  if  moreover  they  are  directed  against  that  school- 
boy's master,  the  result  can  hardly  be  to  his  advantage. 
And  thus  it  fell  out  with  Landor.     He  might  easily  have 


I.]  SCHOOL.  11 

been  the  pride  of  the  school,  for  whatever  were  his  fauHs 
of  temper,  his  brilliant  scholarship  could  not  fail  to  recom- 
mend him  to  his  teachers,  nor  his  ready  kindness  towards 
the  weak,  his  high  spirit  and  sense  of  honour  to  his  com- 
panions. He  was  pugnacious,  but  only  against  the  strong. 
"  You  remember,"  he  writes,  in  some  verses  addressed 
seventy  years  later  to  an  old  school  companion — 

"  You  remember  that  I  fought 
Never  with  any  but  an  older  lad, 
And  never  lost  but  two  fights  in  thirteen." 


"■o'- 


Neither  would  it  much  have  stood  in  Landor's  way  that 
his  lofty  ideas  of  what  was  due  to  himself  made  him  re- 
fuse, at  school  as  afterwards,  to  compete  against  others 
for  prizes  or  distinctions  of  any  kind.  What  did  stand 
in  his  way  was  his  hot  and  resentful  impatience  alike  of 
contradiction  and  of  authority.  Each  half-holiday  of  the 
school  was  by  a  customary  fiction  supposed  to  be  given 
as  a  reward  for  the  copy  of  verses  declared  to  be  the  best 
of  the  day,  and,  with  or  without  reason,  Landor  conceived 
that  the  head  master  —  Dr.  James  —  had  systematically 
grudged  this  recognition  to  verses  of  his.  When  at  last 
play-day  was  given  for  a  copy  of  Landor's,  the  boy  added 
in  transcribing  it  a  rude  postscript,  to  the  effect  that  it 
was  the  worst  he  had  ever  written.  In  other  controver- 
sies that  from  time  to  time  occurred  between  master  and 
scholar,  there  were  not  wanting  kindlier  and  more  humor- 
ous passages  than  this.  But  at  last  there  arose  a  quarrel 
over  a  Latin  quantity,  in  which  Landor  was  quite  right  at 
the  outset,  but  by  his  impracticable  violence  put  himself 
hopelessly  in  the  wrong — complicating  matters  not  only 
with  fierce  retorts,  but  with  such  verses  as  made  authority's 

very  hair  stand  on  end.     This  was  in  his  sixteenth  year, 
25 


12  LANDOR.  [chap. 

when  he  was  within  five  of  being  head  of  the  school. 
The  upshot  was  that  the  head  master  wrote  to  Dr.  Landor, 
with  many  expressions  of  regret,  requesting  that  his  son 
Walter  might  be  removed,  lest  he  should  find  himself  un- 
der the  necessity  of  expelling  him  as  one  not  only  rebel- 
lious himself,  but  a  promoter  of  rebellion  in  others. 

Signs  of  the  same  defiant  spirit  had  not  been  wanting 
in  his  home  life.  The  seeds  seem  to  have  been  already 
sown  of  an  estrangement,  never  afterwards  altogether 
healed,  between  himself  and  his  father.  In  politics  Dr. 
Landor  had  been  originally  a  zealous  "Whig;  but  he  was 
one  of  those  Whigs  for  whom  the  French  Revolution  was 
too  much.  During  that  crisis  he  was  swept  along  the 
stream  of  alarm  and  indignation  which  found  both  voice 
and  nourishment  in  the  furious  eloquence  of  Burke;  and 
when  the  party  at  last  broke  in  two  he  went  with  those 
who  deserted  Fox  and  became  the  fervent  followers  of 
Pitt.  The  boyish  politics  of  young  Landor  were  of  a  very 
different  stamp.  He  was  already,  what  he  remained  to 
the  end  of  his  days,  an  ardent  republican  and  foe  to  kings. 
The  French  Revolution  had  little  to  do  with  making  or 
unmaking  his  sentiments  on  these  points.  His  earliest 
admiration  was  for  Washington,  his  earliest  and  fiercest 
aversion  for  George  IH.  And  he  had  no  idea  of  keeping 
his  opinions  to  himself,  but  would  insist  on  broaching 
them,  no  matter  what  the  place  or  company.  The  young 
rebel  one  day  cried  out  in  his  mother's  room  that  he  wish- 
ed the  French  would  invade  England,  and  assist  us  in 
hanging  George  the  Third  between  two  such  rascals  as  the 
Archbishops  of  Canterbury  and  York ;  whereupon  that  ex- 
cellent lady  was  seen  to  rise,  box  his  ears  from  behind  his 
chair,  and  then  hastily  make  off  upon  her  high-heeled  shoes 
for  fear  of  consequences.     Again,  we  hear  of  his  flinging 


I.]  SCHOOL.  18 

an  impetuous  taunt  across  the  table  at  a  bishop  who  was 
dining  with  his  father,  and  who  had  spoken  slightingly  of 
the  scholarship  of  Porson.  Nevertheless  it  must  not  be 
supposed  that  Landor,  even  in  the  rawest  and  most  com- 
bative days  of  his  youth,  was  at  any  time  merely  ill-condi- 
tioned in  his  behaviour.  He  was  never  without  friends  in 
whom  the  signs  both  of  power  and  tenderness  which  broke  »  0  "^ 
through  his  unruly  ways  inspired  the  warmest  interest  and 
affection.  Such  friends  included  at  this  time  the  most  / 
promising  of  his  schoolmates,  more  than  one  charming 
girl  companion  of  his  own  family  or  their  acquaintances, 
and  several  seniors  of  various  orders  and  conditions.  His 
principal  school  friends  were  Henry  Cary,  afterwards  trans- 
lator of  Dante,  and  Walter  Birch,  an  accomplished  scholar 
who  became  an  Oxford  tutor,  and  ended  his  days  at  a 
country  living  in  Essex.  Girls  of  his  own  age  or  older 
found  something  attractive  in  the  proud  and  stubborn 
boy,  who  for  all  his  awkwardness  and  headlong  temper 
was  chivalrous  to  them,  could  turn  the  prettiest  verses, 
and  no  doubt  even  in  speech  showed  already  some  rudi- 
ments of  that  genius  for  the  art  of  compliment  which  dis- 
tinguished him  beyond  all  men  in  later  life.  Thus  we 
find  him  towards  his  twentieth  year  in  the  habit  of  receiv- 
ing from  Dorothea  Lyttelton,  the  beautiful  orphan  heiress 
of  estates  contiguous  to  his  home,  advice  conveyed  in 
terms  betokening  the  closest  intimacy  and  kindness. 
Among  his  elders  he  attached  to  himself  as  friends  char- 
acters so  opposite  as  "the  elegant  and  generous  Dr. 
Sleath,"  one  of  his  Rugby  masters,  with  whom  he  was 
never  on  any  but  the  kindest  terms;  Mr.  Parkhurst  of 
Ripple,  a  country  squire,  and  father  of  one  of  his  school- 
mates; and  the  famous  Dr.  Parr,  at  that  time  and  for 
many  years  perpetual   curate  of  Hatton,  near  Warwick. 


14  LANDOR.  [chap. 

This  singular  personage,  in  spite  of  many  grotesque  pom- 
posities of  speech,  and  some  of  character,  commanded  re- 
spect alike  by  his  learning  and  his  love  of  liberty.  He 
was  a  pillar  of  advanced  Whig  opinions,  and  a  friend  of 
most  of  the  chief  men  of  that  party.  To  the  study  where 
Parr  lived  ensconced  with  his  legendary  wig  and  pipe,  and 
whence,  in  the  lisping  utterance  that  suited  so  quaintly 
with  his  sesquipedalian  vocabulary,  he  fulminated  against 
Pitt  and  laid  down  the  law  on  Latin  from  amid  piles  of 
books  and  clouds  of  tobacco  -  smoke,  the  young  Landor 
was  wont  to  resort  in  search  of  company  more  congenial 
than  that  of  the  orthodox  clergy  and  lawyers  who  fre- 
quented his  father's  house. 

In  speaking  of  these  friendships  of  Landor's  youth  we 
have  somewhat  anticipated  the  order  of  events.  To  return 
to  the  date  of  his  removal  from  Rugby  :  he  was  next 
placed  under  the  charge  of  a  Dr.  Langley,  at  the  village, 
celebrated  for  the  charms  of  its  scenery,  of  Ashbourne,  in 
Derbyshire.  Here  again  he  showed  how  strong  an  at- 
tachment he  was  capable  of  inspiring  in,  and  returning 
towards,  a  gentle  and  friendly  senior.  In  his  dialogue 
of  Izaak  Walton,  Cotton,  and  Oldways,  Dr.  Langley  is  im- 
mortalized in  the  character  of  the  "  good  parson  of  Ash- 
bourne ;"  "  he  wants  nothing,  yet  he  keeps  the  grammar 
school,  and  is  ready  to  receive  as  private  tutor  any  young 
gentleman  in  preparation  for  Oxford  or  Cambridge,  but 
only  one.  They  live  like  princes,  converse  like  friends, 
and  part  like  lovers."  In  a  note  to  the  same  dialogue,  as 
well  as  several  times  elsewhere,  Landor  explicitly  declares 
his  gratitude  for  the  "  parental  kindness "  of  Dr.  Langley 
and  his  wife,  as  also  that  which  he  bore  all  his  life  to  two 
others  of  his  teachers,  the  above  mentioned  Dr.  Sleath  at 
Rugby,  and  "  the  saintly  Benwell "  at  Oxford. 


I.]  COLLEGE.  16 

In  this  kind  household  Landor  passed  nearly  two  years. 
In  Latin  it  appears  that  he  had  not  much  to  learn  from 
the  good  vicar,  but  he  turned  his  time  to  account  in  read- 
ing the  Greek  writers,  especially  Sophocles  and  Pindar , 
in  translating  some  of  Buchanan  into  English,  and  some 
of  Cowley  into  Latin  verse,  besides  other  poetical  efforts 
in  both  languages.  His  English  verses  at  this  time  show 
him  not  yet  emancipated  from  the  established  precedents 
of  the  eighteenth  century.  It  is  not  until  a  year  or  two 
later  that  we  find  him  abandoning,  in  narrative  poetry,  the 
trim  monotony  of  the  rhyming  couplet  for  a  blank  verse 
of  more  massive  structure  and  statelier  march  than  any 
which  had  been  written  since  Milton. 

At  eighteen  Landor  left  Ashbourne  and  went  into  resi- 
dence at  Trinity  College,  Oxford.  His  abilities  made  their 
impression  at  the  university  in  spite  of  himself;  but  he 
still  would  not  be  persuaded  to  compete  for  any  sort  of 
distinction.  "I  showed  my  compositions  to  Birch  of 
Magdalen,  my  old  friend  at  Rugby,  and  to  Gary,  translator 
of  Dante,  and  to  none  else."  Landor's  reputation  for 
talents  which  he  would  not  put  forth  was  accompanied 
by  a  reputation  for  opinions  which  he  would  not  conceal. 
The  agitation  of  political  parties  was  at  its  height.  The 
latter  course  of  the  Revolution  had  alienated  the  majority- 
even  of  those  who  had  sympathized  with  it  at  first,  and 
the  few  Englishmen  who  did  not  share  the  general  horror 
were  marked  men.  Among  those  few  there  were  at  Ox- 
ford in  these  days  two  undergraduates,  Soutbey  of  Balliol, 
and  Landor  of  Trinity.  The  two  were  not  known  to  each 
other  until  afterwards;  but  they  both  made  themselves 
conspicuous  by  appearing  in  hall  and  elsewhere  with  their 
hair  unpowdered,  a  fashion  which  about  1793 — 1794  was 
a  direct  advertisement  of  revolutionary  sentiments.    "  Take 


16  LA:nDOR.  [chap. 

care,"  said  Landor's  tutor  to  him ;  "  they  will  stone  you 
for  a  republican."  No  such  consequences  in  fact  resulted, 
but  Landor  became  notorious  in  the  university.  He  was 
known  not  only  as  a  Jacobin,  but  as  a  "  mad  Jacobin." 
"  His  Jacobinism,"  says  Southey,  looking  back  to  his  own 
feelings  in  those  days,  "  would  have  made  me  seek  his  ac- 
quaintance, but  for  his  madness."  The  impression  thus 
left  on  Southey's  mind  was  probably  due  less  to  the 
warmth  of  Lan dor's  revolutionary  sentiments  and  lan- 
guage, than  to  the  notoriety  of  the  freak  which,  before 
long,  brought  him  for  the  second  time  into  violent  and  fu- 
tile collision  with  authority.  One  evening  he  invited  his 
friends  to  wine.  He  had  been  out  shooting  in  the  morn- 
ing, and  had  his  gun,  powder,  and  shot  in  the  next  room. 
Opposite  were  the  rooms  of  a  Tory  undergraduate,  "a 
man,"  according  to  Landor's  account,  "  universally  laughed 
at  and  despised ;  and  it  unfortunately  happened  that  he 
had  a  party  on  the  same  day,  consisting  of  servitors  and 
other  raffs  of  every  description."  The  two  parties  began 
exchanging  taunts ;  then  those  opposite  closed  the  shut- 
ters, and  being  on  the  outside,  Landor  proposed,  by  way  of 
a  practical  joke,  to  send  a  charge  of  shot  into  them.  His 
friends  applauded,  and  he  fired.  The  owner  of  the  shut- 
ters naturally  complained,  and  an  inquiry  was  instituted 
to  ascertain  who  was  the  offender.  Landor's  defiant  mood 
at  this  point  played  him  an  ill  turn,  in  that  it  prompted 
him,  instead  of  frankly  stating  the  facts,  to  refuse  all  in- 
formation.  Part  of  his  motive  in  this  course,  as  he  him. 
self  afterwards  explained,  was  his  unwillingness  to  add  to 
the  causes  of  displeasure  which  he  was  conscious  of  having 
already  given  to  his  father.  He  could  not  have  followed 
a  more  injudicious  course.  The  president  was  compelled 
to  push  the  inquiry  and  to  inflict  punishment.     This  he 


t]  COLLEGE.  11 

seems  to  have  done  as  leniently  and  considerately  as  pos- 
sible; and  when  sentence  of  rustication  was  pronounced, 
it  was  with  the  expressed  hope,  on  the  part  of  all  the  col- 
lege authorities  but  one,  that  its  victim  would  soon  return 
to  do  them  honour.  Strangely  enough,  it  seems  also  to 
have  been  hoped  that  a  return  to  his  home  would  bring 
about  a  better  understanding  between  young  Landor  and 
his  father.  But  so  far  from  this  being  the  case,  his  bear- 
ing after  the  freak,  more  even  than  the  freak  itself,  to- 
gether with  his  subsequent  step  of  giving  up  his  college 
rooms,  exasperated  Dr,  Landor ;  passionate  words  were  ex- 
changed ;  and  the  son  turned  his  back  on  his  father's 
house,  as  he  declared  and  believed,  *'  for  ever." 
2 


CHAPTER  II. 

EXPERIMENTS    IN    LIFE    AND    POETRY GKBIE. 

[1794—1804.] 

From  Warwick  Lander  went  at  first  to  London,  where 
he  took  a  lodging  in  Beaumont  Street,  Portland  Place. 
Here  he  worked  hard  for  several  months  at  French  and 
Italian,  having  formed  the  design  of  leaving  England 
and  taking  up  his  abode  in  Italy.  His  Italian  studies 
made  him  an  ardent  admirer  of  Alfieri,  whom  he  always 
afterwards  counted  it  an  event  to  have  met  once  at  this 
time  in  a  bookseller's  shop.  During  these  months  he 
also  brought  out  his  first  book, "  The  Poems  of  Walter 
Savage  Landor ;  printed  for  T.  Cadell,  jun.  and  W.  Davies 
(successors  to  John  Cadell)  in  the  Strand,  1795."  This 
small  volume  is  now  very  rare,  having  been,  like  several 
of  Landor's  writings,  withdrawn  from  sale  by  its  author 
within  a  few  weeks  of  publication.  It  contained  a  num- 
ber of  poems  and  epigrams  in  English,  besides  a  collection 
of  Latin  verses  and  a  prose  Defensio  vindicating  the  use 
of  that  language  by  the  moderns.  The  principal  English 
pieces  are  a  poem  in  three  cantos  on  the  Birth  of  Poesy, 
an  Apology  for  Satire,  a  tale  of  Pyramus  and  Thisbe,  im- 
itated from  Ovid,  an  Epistle  of  Abelard  to  Eloisa,  all  in 
the  rhymed  heroic  couplet,  an  ode  To  Washington  in  the 
style  of  Gray,  and  a  short  poem  in  the  metre  since  made 


CHAP.  II.]     EXPERIMENTS   IN   LIFE   AND   POETRY.  19 

popular  by  In  Memoriam,  called  French  Villagers.  Lan- 
der already  shows  indications  of  a  manner  more  vigorous 
and  personal  than  that  of  the  current  poetry  of  the  day, 
but  in  diction  as  well  as  in  the  choice  of  metrical  forms 
he  is  still  under  the  rule  of  eighteenth  century  conven- 
tions, and  writes  of  nymphs  and  swains,  Bellona  and  the 
Zephyrs.  At  Oxford,  where  the  rumour  of  his  talents 
and  the  notoriety  of  his  escapade  were  still  fresh,  his 
little  volume  seems  to  have  made  an  impression,  and  to 
have  been  in  demand  as  long  as  it  remained  in  circulation. 
Another  literary  venture  made  by  Landor  during  these 
months  in  London  did  not,  like  the  last,  bear  his  name. 
This  was  a  satire  against  Pitt,  in  the  form  of  a  Moral 
Epistle  in  heroic  verse,  addressed  to  Earl  Stanhope,  with 
a  prose  preface  in  which  the  republican  poet  condoles 
with  the  republican  peer  on  his  possession  of  hereditary 
honours. 

While  the  young  Landor  was  thus  engaged  with  poetry 
and  politics  in  London,  the  good  offices  of  friends,  and 
foremost  among  them  of  the  fair  Dorothea  Lyttelton  and 
her  uncles,  had  been  employed  in  seeking  to  reconcile  him 
with  his  family.  Several  propositions  as  to  his  future 
mode  of  life  were  successively  made  and  dropped — one 
being  that  he  should  be  offered  a  commission  then  va- 
cant in  the  Warwickshire  Militia.  This  scheme,  howev- 
er, never  came  to  Lander's  knowledge,  having  fallen  to  the 
ground  when  it  was  ascertained  that  the  other  gentlemen^ 
of  the  corps  would  resign  rather  than  serve  with  a  com- 
rade of  his  opinions.  The  arrangement  ultimately  made 
was  that  he  should  receive  an  allowance  of  a  hundred  and 
fifty  pounds  a  year,  and  be  free  to  live  as  he  liked,  it  being 
understood  that  the  idea  of  a  retreat  to  Italy  was  given  up, 
and  that  he  was  welcome  to  free  quarters  at  his  father's 


20  LANDOR.  [chap. 

house  whenever  he  pleased.  If  this  allowance  seems 
small,  it  must  be  remembered  that  Dr.  Lan dor's  family 
property  in  Staffordshire  was  worth  something  under  a 
thousand  pounds  a  year;  while  there  were  six  younger 
children  for  whom  Mrs.  Landor,  her  estates  being  strictly 
entailed  upon  her  eldest  son,  held  herself  bound  to  make 
provision  out  of  her  income  during  her  life.  To  her 
careful  and  impartial  justice  towards  all  her  children  there 
exists  abundant  testimony,  including  that  of  Walter  him- 
self, whose  feelings  towards  his  mother  were  at  all  times 
those  of  unclouded  gratitude  and  affection. 

Matters  having  been  thus  arranged,  Landor  left  London, 
and,  with  the  exception  of  occasional  visits  to  his  family, 
led  during  the  next  three  years  a  life  of  seclusion  in  South 
Wales.  He  took  up  his  residence  on  the  coast,  of  which 
the  natural  charms  were  not  then  defiled  as  they  are  now 
by  the  agglomerations  and  exhalations  of  the  mining  and 
smelting  industries.  Having  his  headquarters  generally 
at  Swansea,  sometimes  at  Tenby,  and  sometimes  taking 
excursions  into  remoter  parts  of  the  Principality,  he  filled 
the  chief  part  of  his  time  with  strenuous  reading  and 
meditation.  His  reminiscences  of  the  occupations  of  these 
days  are  preserved  in  sundry  passages  both  of  prose  and 
rhyme.  Thus,  contrasting  the  tenour  of  his  own  youth 
with  that  of  Moore's — 

"  Alone  I  spent  my  earlier  hour, 
While  thou  wert  in  the  roseate  bower, 
And  raised  to  thee  was  every  eye, 
And  every  song  won  every  sigh. 
One  servant  and  one  chest  of  books 
FoUow'd  me  into  mountain  nooks, 
Where,  shelter'd  from  the  sun  and  breeze,     . 
Lay  Pindar  and  Thucydides." 


il]  experiments  in  life  and  poetry.  21 

Amonff  all  the  ancient  and  modern  writers  whom  Landor 
read  and  pondered  at  this  time,  those  who  had  most  share 
in  forming  his  mind  seem  to  have  been  Pindar  and  Milton. 
What  he  admired,  he  says,  in  Pindar,  was  his  "  proud 
complacency  and  scornful  strength.  If  I  could  resemble 
him  in  nothing  else,  I  was  resolved  to  be  as  compendious 
and  as  exclusive."  But  the  strongest  spell  was  that  laid 
upon  him  by  Milton,  for  whom,  alike  as  a  poet,  hero,  and 
republican  seer  and  prophet,  he  now  first  conceived  the 
enthusiastic  reverence  which  afterwards  inspired  some  of 
his  noblest  writing.  "  My  prejudices  in  favour  of  ancient 
literature  began  to  wear  away  on  reading  Paradise  Lost, 
and  even  the  great  hexameter  sounded  to  me  tinkling 
when  I  had  recited  aloud,  in  my  solitary  walks  on  the 
sea-shore,  the  haughty  appeal  of  Satan  and  the  repentance 
of  Eve."  Here,  from  a  letter  written  long  after  to  Lady 
Blessington,  is  another  retrospective  glimpse  of  his  life  in 
those  days.  "  I  lived,"  he  writes,  "  chiefly  among  woods, 
which  are  now  killed  with  copper  works,  and  took  my 
walks  over  sandy  sea-coast  deserts,  then  covered  with  low 
roses  and  thousands  of  nameless  flowers  and  plants,  trodden 
by  the  naked  feet  of  the  Welsh  peasantry,  and  trackless. 
These  creatures  were  somewhat  between  me  and  the  ani- 
mals, and  were  as  useful  to  the  landscape  as  masses  of 
weed  or  stranded  boats."  Never  were  his  spirits  better, 
he  writes  in  the  same  connexion,  although  he  did  not 
exchange  twelve  sentences  with  men. 

It  is  clear  that  Landor  here  exaggerates  in  some  degree 
the  loneliness  of  his  life.  If  he  did  not  exchange  twelve 
sentences  with  men,  he  at  all  events  found  occasion  for 
more  extended  parley  with  the  other  sex.  He  was,  in  fact, 
by  no  means  as  much  a  stranger  to  the  roseate  bower  as 
the  verses  above  quoted  might  lead  us  to  suppose.     These 


22  LANDOR.  [chap. 

days  of  solitary  rambles  and  high  communings,  "  Studies 
intense  of  strong  and  stern  delight" — the  line  is  his  own 
— were  also  to  Landor  days  of  romance.  The  earliest 
heroine  of  his  devotions  during  his  life  in  Wales  was  call- 
ed in  the  language  of  poetry  lone,  and  in  that  of  daily 
life  Jones.  To  her  succeeded,  but  without,  it  would  seem, 
altogether  supplanting  her,  a  second  and  far  more  serious 
flame.  This  was  a  blithe  Irish  lady,  who  conceived  a 
devoted  passion  for  the  haughty  and  studious  youth,  and 
whom  her  poet  called  lanthe.  lanthe  stands  for  Jane, 
and  the  full  name  of  the  lady  was  Sophia  Jane  Swift — af- 
terwards Countess  de  Molande.  I  find  the  history  of  these 
names  lone  and  lanthe,  which  fill  so  considerable  a  place 
in  Landor's  early  poetry,  set  down  as  follows  in  one  of 
those  autobiographical  jottings  in  verse  which  he  djd  not 
think  it  worth  while  to  publish,  but  which  are  character- 
istic as  illustrating  his  energetic  and  deliberate  way  of 
turning  trifles  into  verse : 

"  Sometimes,  as  boys  will  do,  I  play'd  at  love, 
Nor  fear'd  cold  weather,  nor  withdrew  in  hot ; 
And  two  who  were  my  playmates  at  that  hour, 
Hearing  me  call'd  a  poet,  in  some  doubt 
Challenged  me  to  adapt  their  names  to  song, 
lone  was  the  first ;  her  name  is  heard 
Among  the  hills  of  Cambria,  north  and  south, 
But  there  of  shorter  stature,  like  herself ; 
I  placed  a  comely  vowel  at  its  close, 
And  drove  an  ugly  sibilant  away. 

Hc  «  *  *  * 

lanthfe,  who  came  later,  smiled  and  said, 
I  have  two  names  and  will  be  praised  in  both ; 
Sophia  is  not  quite  enough  for  me, 
And  you  have  simply  named  it,  and  but  oncer 
Now  call  the  other  up — 


i 


11.]  EXPERIMENTS  IN  LITE  AND  POETRY.  23 

I  went,  and  planted  in  a  fresh  parterre 
lanth^ ;  it  was  blooming,  when  a  youth 
Leapt  o'er  the  hedge,  and  snatching  at  the  stem 
Broke  off  the  label  from  my  favourite  flower, 
And  stuck  it  on  a  sorrier  of  his  own." 

The  sally  in  the  last  lines  is  curious.  Both  Shelley  and 
Byron  have  made  English  readers  familiar  with  the  name 
lanthe.  So  far  as  I  can  learn,  it  had  not  appeared  in 
English  poetry  at  all  until  it  was  introduced  by  Landor, 
except  in  Dryden's  translation  of  the  story  of  Iphis  and 
lanthe  from  Ovid.  It  was  in  1813  that  both  Byron  chose 
it  as  a  fancy  name  for  Lady  Ann  Harley,  in  the  dedica- 
tion of  Childe  Harold,  and  Shelley  as  a  real  name  to  be 
given  to  his  infant  daughter.  The  "  youth  "  of  the  above 
extract  can  hardly  be  any  other  than  Byron,  whom  Landor 
neither  liked  nor  much  admired,  and  whom  he  considered, 
as  we  thus  perceive,  to  have  borrowed  this  beautiful  name 
lanthe  from  bis  own  early  poetry. 

Upon  the  whole,  the  life  led  by  Landor  at  twenty,  and 
for  the  years  next  following,  was  one  well  suited  to  the 
training  of  a  poet.  He  nourished  his  mind  resolutely 
upon  the  noblest  sustenance,  making  his  own  all  that  was 
best  in  the  literatures  of  ancient  and  modern  Europe — ex- 
cept, indeed,  in  the  literature  of  Germany,  which  had  been 
then  barely  discovered  in  England  by  a  few  explorers  like 
Scott,  Coleridge,  and  William  Taylor  of  Norwich,  and  to 
which  Landor  neither  now  nor  afterwards  felt  himself  at- 
tracted. He  haunted,  moreover,  with  the  keenest  enjoy- 
ment of  its  scenery,  a  region  hardly  less  romantic  or  less 
impressive  than  that  which  was  inspiring  at  the  same  time 
the  youth  of  Wordsworth,  If  he  was  inclined  to  trifle 
with  the  most  serious  of  things,  love,  that  is  a  fault  by 
which  the  quality  of  a  man's  life  suffers,  but  not  neces" 


84  LANDOR.  [chap. 

sarily  the  quality  of  his  song ;  and  experiences  both  more 
transient  and  more  reckless  than  his  have  made  of  a 
Burns  or  a  Heine  the  exponents  of  the  passion  for  all 
generations. 

Landor,  however,  was  not  destined  to  be  one  of  the 
master  poets  either  of  nature,  like  Wordsworth,  or  of  pas- 
sion, like  Burns  or  Heine.  All  his  life  he  gave  proof,  in 
poetry,  of  remarkable  and  versatile  capacity,  but  of  no 
overmastering  vocation.  So  little  sure,  indeed,  in  youth 
was  he  of  his  own  vocation,  that  his  first  important  poem, 
Gebir,  was  suggested  by  an  accident  and  prefaced  with  an 
apology.  The  history  of  Gebir  is  this :  Landor  had  made 
friends  at  Tenby  with  the  family  of  Lord  Aylmer,  and 
one  of  the  young  ladies  of  that  family,  his  especial  and 
close  friend  Kose  Aylmer,  lent  him  a  history  of  romance 
by  one  Clara  Reeve.  At  the  end  of  this  book  he  found 
a  sketch  of  a  tale,  nominally  Arabian,  which  struck  his 
imagination  as  having  in  it  something  of  a  shadowy, 
antique  grandeur — magnificum  quid  sub  crepusculo  anti- 
quitatis,  as  he  afterwards  defined  the  quality — and  out  of 
which  he  presently  constructed  the  following  story  :  Gebir 
(whence  Gibraltar),  a  prince  of  Spain,  in  fulfilment  of  a 
vow  binding  him  to  avenge  hereditary  wrongs,  makes  war 
against  Charoba,  a  young  queen  of  Egypt.  Charoba  seeks 
counsel  of  her  nurse,  the  sorceress  Dalica,  who  devises  suc- 
cour through  her  magic  arts.  An  interview  next  takes 
place  between  Charoba  and  the  invader,  when  their  enmity 
changes  into  mutual  love.  Gebir  hereupon  directs  his 
army  to  restore  and  colonize  a  ruined  city  which  had  been 
founded  in  the  country  of  Charoba  by  one  of  his  ances- 
tors ;  and  the  work  is  begun  and  carried  on  until  it  is  sud- 
denly undone  by  magic.  Meanwhile  the  brother  of  Gebir, 
Tamar,  a  shepherd-prince,  whose  task  it  is  to  tend  the 


n.]  GEBIR.  26 

flocks  of  the  invading  host,  has  in  his  turn  fallen  _  in  love 
with  an  ocean  nymph,  who  had  encountered  and  beaten 
him  in  wrestling.  Gebir  persuades  Tamar  to  let  him  try 
a  fall  with  the  nymph,  and  throwing  her,  learns  from  her, 
first  promising  that  she  shall  have  the  hand  of  Tamar  for 
her  reward,  the  rites  to  be  performed  in  order  that  his 
city  may  rise  unimpeded.  In  the  fulfilment  of  these  rites 
Gebir  visits  the  under-world,  and  beholds  the  shades  of 
his  ancestors.  After  his  return  it  is  agreed  that  he  shall 
be  wedded  to  Charoba.  Tamar  also  and  his  nymph  are 
to  be  united ;  their  marriage  takes  place  first,  and  the 
nymph,  warning  her  husband  of  calamities  about  to  befall 
in  Egypt,  persuades  him  to  depart  with  her,  and  after 
leading  him  in  review  past  all  the  shores  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean, unfolds  to  him  a  vision  of  the  glory  awaiting  his 
descendants  in  the  lands  between  the  Rhine  and  the 
Garonne.  Then  follows  the  marriage  of  Gebir  and  Cha- 
roba, which  they  and  their  respective  hosts  intend  to  be 
the  seal  of  a  great  reconciliation.  But,  inasmuch  as 
"women  communicate  their  fears  more  willingly  than 
their  love,"  Charoba  has  never  avowed  her  change  of  heart 
to  Dalica,  who  believes  the  marriage  to  be  only  a  stratagem 
devised  by  the  queen  to  get  Gebir  within  her  power.  Ac- 
cordingly she  gives  the  bridegroom,  to  put  on  during  the 
ceremony,  a  poisoned  garment  which  she  has  obtained 
from  her  sister,  a  sorceress  stronger  than  herself.  The 
poison  takes  effect,  and  the  poem  ends  with  the  death  of 
Gebir  in  the  arms  of  the  despairing  Charoba,  and  in  view 
of  the  assembled  hosts. 

Such  is  the  plot,  shadowy  in  truth  and  somewhat  cha- 
otic, of  Landor's  first  considerable  poem.     In  his  preface 
he  declares  the  work  to  be  "  the  fruit  of  Idleness  and  Ig- 
norance ;  for  had  I  been  a  botanist  or  a  mineralogist,  it 
C      2* 


26  LANDOR.  [chap. 

liad  never  been  written."  We  ought,  however,  to  qualify 
these  careless  words  of  the  preface,  by  remembering  those 
of  the  poem  itself,  in  which  he  invokes  the  spirit  of  Shak- 
speare,  and  tells  how — 

" panting  in  the  play-hour  of  my  youth, 


I  drank  of  Avon,  too,  a  dangerous  draught 
That  roused  within  the  feverish  thirst  of  song." 

Having  determined  to  write  Gebir,  Landor  hesitated  for 
some  time  whether  to  do  so  in  Latin  or  in  English,  and 
had  even  composed  some  portions  in  the  former  language 
before  he  finally  decided  in  favour  of  the  latter.  And 
then,  when  he  had  written  his  first  draft  of  the  poem  in 
English,  he  lost  the  manuscript,  and  only  recovered  it  after 
a  considerable  time.  Here  is  his  account  of  the  matter  as 
he  recollected  it  in  old  age : 

"  Sixty  the  years  since  Fidler  bore 
My  grouse-bag  up  the  Bala  moor ; 
Above  the  lakes,  along  the  lea, 
Where  gleams  the  darkly  yellow  Dee ; 
Through  crags,  o'er  cliffs,  I  carried  there 
My  verses  with  paternal  care, 
But  left  them,  and  went  home  again 
To  wing  the  birds  upon  the  plain. 
With  heavier  luggage  half  forgot, 
For  many  months  they  follow'd  not. 
When  over  Tawey's  sands  they  came, 
Brighter  flew  up  my  winter  flame. 
And  each  old  cricket  sang  alert 
With  joy  that  they  had  come  unhurt." 

When  he  had  recovered  the  manuscript  of  his  poem, 
Landor  next  proceeded  to  condense  it.  He  cuts  out,  he 
tells  us,  nearly  half  of  what  he  had  written.  The  poem 
as  so  abridged  is,  for  its  length,  probably  the  most  "  com- 
pendious and  exclusive "  which  exists.     The  narrative  is 


u.]  GEBIR.  27 

packed  into  a  space  where  it  has  no  room  to  dcvclope  it- 
self at  ease.  The  transitions  from  one  theme  to  another 
are  effected  with  more  than  Pindaric  abruptness,  and  the 
difficulty  of  the  poem  is  further  increased  by  the  occur- 
rence of  grammatical  constructions  borrowed  from  the 
Latin,  and  scarcely  intelligible  to  those  ignorant  of  that 
language.  It  is  only  after  considerable  study  that  the 
reader  succeeds  in  taking  in  Gebir  as  a  whole,  however 
much  he  may  from  the  first  be  impressed  by  the  power  of 
particular  passages.  Next  to  the  abruptness  and  the  con- 
densation of  Gebir,  its  most  striking  qualities  are  breadth 
and  vividness  of  imagination.  Taken  severally,  and  with- 
out regard  to  their  sequence  and  connexion,  these  colossal 
figures  and  supernatural  actions  are  presented  with  master- 
ly reality  and  force.  As  regards  style  and  language,  Lan- 
dor  shows  that  he  has  not  been  studying  the  great  masters 
in  vain.  He  has  discarded  Bellona  and  the  Zephyrs,  and 
calls  things  by  their  proper  names,  admitting  no  height- 
ening of  language  that  is  not  the  natural  expression  of 
heightened  thought.  For  loftiness  of  thought  and  lan- 
guage together,  there  are  passages  in  Gebir  that  will  bear 
comparison  with  Milton.  There  are  lines  too  that  for 
majesty  of  rhythm  will  bear  the  same  comparison ;  but 
majestic  as  Landor's  blank  verse  often  is,  it  is  always  too 
regular;  it  exhibits  none  of  the  Miltonic  variety,  none  of 
the  inventions  in  violation  or  suspension  of  ordinary  met- 
rical law,  by  which  that  great  master  draws  unexampled 
tones  from  his  instrument. 

Here,  indeed,  was  a  contrast  to  the  fashionable  poetry 
of  the  hour,  to  the  dulcet  inanities  of  Hayley  and  of  Miss 
Seward.  Gebir  appeared  just  at  the  mid -point  of  time 
between  the  complaint  of  Blake  concerning  the  truancy  of 

the  Muses  from  England, 
26 


28  LANDOR.  [chap. 

"  The  languid  strings  do  scarcely  move, 
The  sound  is  forced,  the  notes  are  few," 

and  the  thanksgiving  of  Keats, 


" fine  sounds  are  floating  wild 

About  the  earth." 

Of  the  fine  sounds  that  heralded  to  modern  ears  the  re- 
vival of  English  poetry,  Gehir  will  always  remain  for  stu- 
dents one  of  the  most  distinctive.     The  Lyrical  Ballads, 
the  joint  venture  of  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth,  which  ap- 
peared in  the  same  year  as  Gehir,  began  with  the  Ancient 
Mariner,  a  work  of  even  more  vivid  and  haunting,  if  also 
more  unearthly,  imagery,  and  ended  with  the  Lines  writ- 
ten on  revisiting  Tintern  Abbey,  which  conveyed  the  first 
notes  of  a  far  deeper  spiritual  message.     But  nowhere  in 
the  works  of  Wordsworth  or  Coleridge  do  we  find  any- 
thing resembling  Landor's  peculiar  qualities  of  haughty 
splendour  and  massive  concentration.     The  message,  such 
as  it  is,  of  Gebir  is  mainly   political  and  philanthropic. 
The  tragic  end  of  the  hero  and  his  bride  is  designed  to 
i  point  a  moral  against  the  enterprises  of  hatred  and  arabi- 
l  tion,  the  happy  fates  of  Tamar  and  the  nymph  to  illus- 
trate the  reward  that  awaits  the  peaceful.     The  progeny 
/whom  the  latter  pair  see  in  a  vision  celebrating  the  tri- 
I  umphs  of  liberty  are  intended  to  symbolize  the  people  of 
'  revolutionary  France.     The  passage  describing  their  fes- 
tivity, cancelled  in  subsequent  editions,  is  one  of  the  best 
in  the  original  poem,  and  its  concluding  image  may  serve 
to  illustrate  both  the  style  and  the  versification  of  Gebir 
at  least  as  well  as  other  passages  more  commonly  quoted, 
like  the  shell,  the  meeting  of  the  prince  and  Charoba,  or 
the  bath  of  Charoba. 


ii.J  GEBIR.  29 

"  What  hoary  form  so  vigorous  vast  bends  here  ? 
Time,  Time  himself  throws  off  his  motley  garb, 
Figured  with  monstrous  men  and  monstrous  gods, 
And  in  pure  vesture  enters  their  pure  fanes, 
A  proud  partaker  of  their  festivals. 
Captivity  led  captive,  war  o'erthrown, 
They  shall  o'er  Europe,  shall  o'er  earth  extend 
Empire  that  seas  alone  and  skies  confine, 
And  glory  that  shall  strike  the  crystal  stars." 

In  the  same  spirit  Buonaparte  is  included  among  the  de- 
scendants of  Tamar,  and  his  birth  foreshadowed  as  that  of 

"  A  mortal  man  above  all  mortal  praise." 

On  the  other  hand  George  III.  is  introduced,  with  a  lordly 
neglect  of  the  considerations  of  time  and  space,  among  the 
ancestors  of  Gebir  suffering  the  penalty  of  their  crimes 
in  the  nether  regions.  "Aroar,"  cries  the  prince  to  his 
guide — 

"  Aroar,  what  wretch  that  nearest  us  ?     What  wretch 
Is  that  with  eyebrows  white,  and  slanting  brow  ?" 

(In  conversation,  it  may  be  mentioned,  Landor  had  an- 
other formula  for  expressing  his  aversion  for  the  physical 
appearance  of  his  sovereign.  He  had  only  seen  him  once, 
and  "  his  eyes,"  he  was  accustomed  to  -say — "  his  eyes 
looked  as  if  they  had  been  cut  out  of  a  vulture's  gizzard.") 
In  taking  leave  of  Gebir,  let  us  only  note  farther  the  per- 
sonal allusions  which  it  contains  in  two  passages  to  Lan- 
dor's  relations  with  his  lone.  One  is  a  direct  apostrophe 
in  which  he  celebrates  her  beauties ;  her  cheeks,  her  tem- 
ples, her  lips,  her  eyes,  her  throat,  which  he  calls  love's 
column 

"  Marmoreal,  trophied  round  with  golden  hair." 


30  LAKDOR.  [chap. 

In  the  other  passage  she  is  introduced  among  the  choir  of 
nymphs  attendant  upon  the  bride  of  Tamar : 

"  Scarce  the  sweet-flowing  music  he  imbibes, 
Or  sees  the  peopled  Ocean  ;  scarce  he  sees 
Spio  with  sparkUng  eyes,  or  Beroe 
Demure,  and  young  lon^,  less  renown'd, 
Not  less  divine,  mild-natured,  Beauty  form'd 
Her  face,  her  heart  Fidelity ;  for  gods 
Design'd  a  mortal,  too,  lonfe  loved." 

Landor  was  at  all  times  sensible  enough  of  the  difier- 
ence  between  his  own  marble  and  other  men's  stucco ;  and 
he  expected  great  things  of  Gebir.  At  the  same  time,  he 
published  it  in  the  manner  least  likely  to  ensure  success, 
that  is  anonymously,  and  in  pamphlet  shape,  through  a 
local  publisher  at  Warwick,  Considering  the  reception 
given  twenty  years  afterwards  to  the  poetry  of  Keats  and 
Shelley,  it  is  no  wonder  that  Gebir  was  neglected.  The 
poem  found,  indeed,  one  admirer,  and  that  was  Southey, 
who  read  it  with  enthusiasm,  recommended  it  in  speech 
and  writing  to  his  friends,  Cobbe,  William  Taylor,  Gros- 
venor  Bedford,  the  Hebers,  and  in  the  year  following  its 
publication  (1799)  called  public  attention  to  it  in  the 
pages  of  the  Critical  Review.  Another  distinguished  ad- 
mirer, of  some  years  later  date,  was  De  Quincey,  who  was 
accustomed  to  profess — although  Landor  scouted  the  pro- 
fession— that  he  also  had  for  some  time  "  conceited  him- 
self "  to  be  the  sole  purchaser  and  appreciater  of  Gebir. 
Southey's  praise  in  the  Critical  Review  was  soon  balanced 
by  a  disparaging  article  in  the  Monthly,  in  which  the 
anonymous  author  was  charged,  among  other  things,  with 
having  too  closely  imitated  Milton,  To  this  Landor  pre- 
pared a  reply,  written,  to  judge  by  the  specimens  given  in 
Forster's  Life,  in  just  the  same  solid,  masculine,  clenching 


II.]  EXPERIMENTS  IN  LIFE  AND  POETRY.  81 

style  with  which  we  are  familiar  in  his  later  prose,  but 
withheld  from  publication  in  deference  to  the  judicious 
advice  of  a  friend. 

Whether  the  scant  success  of  his  poem  really  had  any- 
thing to  do  with  the  restlessness  of  Landor's  life  and  the 
desultoriness  of  his  efforts  during  the  next  few  years,  we 
can  hardly  tell.  He  says  himself,  in  his  lofty  way,  that  if 
even  foolish  men  had  cared  for  Gehir,  he  should  have  con- 
tinued to  apply  himself  to  poetry,  since  "  there  is  some- 
thing of  summer  in  the  hum  of  insects."  As  it  was  he 
allowed  himself  to  drift.  He  began  to  diversify  his  exile 
witl^  frequent  and  prolonged  visits  to  Bath,  London,  Brigh- 
ton. He  tried  his  powers  fitfully  in  many  directions.  Dr. 
Parr  was  eager  to  enlist  his  young  friend  in  the  ranks  of 
Whig  journalism,  and  persuaded  him  to  place  himself  in 
relations  with  Robert  Adair,  the  right-hand  man  in  these 
matters  of  Charles  James  Fox ;  under  whose  guidance  Lan- 
der became  for  a  while  a  frequenter  of  the  reporter's  gal- 
lery, a  contributor  to  the  Courier,  and  a  butt  for  the  at- 
tacks of  the  Anti-Jacobin.  In  scorn  and  denunciation  of 
"  the  Execrable  " — that  is  to  say,  of  Pitt  and  of  his  policy 
— Landor  could  be  trusted  not  to  fail;  but  in  support  of 
Fox  and  his,  it  was  unsafe  to  count  upon  him  too  far.  He 
was  not,  indeed,  of  the  stuff  of  which  practically  effective 
political  writers  are  made.  While  he  despised  party  watch- 
words and  party  men,  his  temperament  was  not  dispassion- 
ate enough  for  wise  neutrality.  His  political  writings,  as 
we  shall  see,  testify  to  a  staunch  and  high  devotion  to  the 
great  principles  of  freedom  and  of  justice,  as  well  as  to  a 
just  observation  of  many  of  the  broad  facts  of  politics 
and  society.  But  in  dealing  with  individual  problems  and 
persons  Landor  knows  no  measure,  and  is  capable  neither 
of  allowance  nor  abatement.     In  his  eyes  all  champions  of 


32  LANDOR.  [chap. 

liberty  are  for  the  time  being  spotless  heroes ;  nearly  all 
kings,  tyrants  to  be  removed  by  the  dagger  or  the  rope ; 
and,  with  a  few  shining  exceptions,  most  practical  politi- 
cians knaves  and  fools. 

How  long  Lander's  connexion  with  the  Courier  lasted 
does  not  appear ;  but  it  was,  at  any  rate,  not  terminated  till 
the  resignation  of  Pitt,  and  the  formation  of  the  Adding- 
ton  Ministry  in  1801.  This  event  exasperated  the  Whig 
party,  and  especially  Parr,  whose  correspondence  with  Lan- 
dor  at  this  time  consists  of  pompous  and  elaborate  dia- 
tribes, the  substance  of  which  he  entreats  his  young  friend 
to  recast  for  publication  in  the  party  sheet.  Then  ensued 
the  peace  of  Luneville;  and  in  the  next  year,  1802,  the 
peace  of  Amiens,  Landor,  like  all  the  world,  took  the  op- 
portunity to  visit  Paris ;  but,  like  himself,  declined  to  ac- 
cept introductions  or  to  pay  any  kind  of  personal  homage 
to  the  victorious  Consul  or  to  his  ministers.  His,  at  least, 
was  not  one  among  the  feeble  heads,  to  slavery  prone, 
upon  which  "Wordsworth  poured  scorn  on  the  same  occa- 
sion. Landor  travelled  alone,  made  his  own  observations 
on  the  people  and  the  country;  witnessed,  from  the  illu- 
minated garden  of  the  Tuileries,  the  young  conqueror's  re- 
ception by  the  multitude  when  he  appeared  at  the  window 
of  the  palace,  and  contrived,  in  the  great  review  afterwards, 
to  get  a  place  within  a  few  feet  of  him  as  he  rode  by.  Of 
all  this  Landor  wrote  fully  and  unaffectedly  at  the  time  in 
letters,  which  have  been  preserved,  to  his  sisters  and  broth- 
ers. Here,  written  ten  years  afterwards,  and  coloured  by 
a  certain  measure  of  deliberate  and,  in  truth,  somewhat 
over-magniloquent  rhetoric,  is  his  account  of  the  reflexions 
to  which  another  incident  of  his  Paris  trip  gave  rise ;  I 
mean  his  visit  to  the  spoils  of  art  there  collected  in  the 
Louvre  from  the  churches  and  galleries  of  Italy  and  of  all 


n.]  EXPERIMENTS  IN  LIFE  AND  POETRY.  33 

Europe.  *'  I  went,"  lie  says,  "  with  impatient  haste  to  be- 
hold these  wonders  of  their  age  and  of  all  ages  succeed- 
ing, but  no  sooner  had  I  ascended  a  few  steps  leading  to 
them  than  I  leaned  back  involuntarily  against  the  balus- 
ters, and  my  mind  was  overshadowed  and  almost  overpow- 
ered by  these  reflections :  has  then  the  stupidity  of  men 
who  could  not,  in  the  whole  course  of  their  existence,  have 
given  birth  to  anything  equal  to  the  smallest  of  the  works 
above,  been  the  cause  of  their  removal  from  the  country 
of  those  who  produced  them  ?  Kings,  whose  fatuity  would 
have  befitted  them  better  to  drive  a  herd  of  swine  than  to 
direct  the  energies  of  a  nation  !  Well,  well !  I  will  lose 
for  a  moment  the  memory  of  their  works  in  contemplat- 
ing those  of  greater  men." 

The  events  of  the  last  five  years  had  had  no  more  effect 
than  those  of  the  five  preceding  them  in  modifying  the 
essential  points  of  Landor's  political  creed.  The  portents 
of  the  Directory  and  Consulate  had  no  more  been  able 
than  the  orgies  of  the  Terror  to  disgust  him  with  repub- 
licanism or  to  reconcile  him  to  monarchy.  He  had  shared, 
indeed,  the  chagrin  and  reprobation  with  which  all  friends 
of  liberty  looked  on  the  subversion  by  revolutionary 
France,  now  that  she  was  transformed  into  a  conquering 
power,  of  ancient  liberties  outside  her  borders.  But  it 
was  France  only,  and  not  the  Revolution,  that  Landor  held 
guilty.  He  had  by  this  time  conceived  for  that  country 
and  its  inhabitants  an  aversion  in  which  he  never  after- 
wards wavered.  "  A  scoundrel  of  a  Frenchman — tautology 
quantum  scoundrel  —  did  so  and  so,"  he  wrote  once  to 
Hare,  and  the  words  convey  his  sentiments  on  the  subject 
in  a  nutshell.  The  French  are  for  him  henceforward  the 
most  ferocious,  the  most  inconstant,  the  most  ungoverna- 
ble of  human  beings,     "As  to  the  cause  of  liberty,"  he 


34  LANDOR.  [chap. 

writes  'Trom  Paris  to  his  brother  in  1 802,  "  this  cursed  na- 
tion has  ruined  it  for  ever."  The  fault  in  his  eyes  is  not 
nearly  so  much  that  of  their  new  master  as  their  own. 
Buonaparte  is  indeed  no  longer  for  Landor  the  mortal  man 
above  all  mortal  praise  of  Gebir,  any  more  than  the  French 
people  are  the  peaceful  progeny  of  Tamar ;  but  he  is  the 
best  ruler  for  such  a  race.  "Doubtless  the  government 
of  Buonaparte  is  the  best  that  can  be  contrived  for  French- 
men. Monkeys  must  be  chained,  though  it  may  cost  them 
some  grimaces."  And  again,  reiterating  the  same  idea 
more  gravely  ten  years  afterwards,  Landor  writes:  "No 
people  is  so  incapable  of  governing  itself  as  the  French, 
and  no  government  is  so  proper  for  it  as  a  despotic  and 
a  military  one.  A  nation  more  restless  and  rapacious 
than  any  horde  in  Tartary  can  be  controlled  only  by  a 
Ghenghiz  Khan.  .  .  .  Their  emperor  has  acted  towards 
them  with  perfect  wisdom,  and  will  leave  to  some  future 
Machiavelli,  if  Europe  should  again  see  so  consummate  a 
politician,  a  name  which  may  be  added  to  Agathocles  and 
Caesar  Borgia.  He  has  amused  himself  with  a  display  of 
every  character  from  Masaniello  up  to  Charlemagne,  but 
in  all  his  pranks  and  vagaries  he  has  kept  one  foot  upon 
Frenchmen." 

This  whimsical  energy  of  dislike  extends  from  the  po- 
litical to  the  private  characteristics  of  the  French  ;  to  their 
looks,  their  voices  and  manners,  and  even  to  the  scenery 
and  climate  of  their  country.  "  Of  all  the  coasts,"  it  is 
declared  in  one  of  his  dialogues — "  of  all  the  coasts  in  the 
universe,  of  the  same  extent,  those  of  France  for  nearly 
their  totality  in  three  seas  are  the  least  beautiful  and  the 
least  interesting."  "  The  children,  the  dogs,  the  frogs,  are 
more  clamorous  than  ours;  the  cocks  are  shriller."  The 
language  of  the  French,  as  a  language,  Landor  also  thinks 


n.]  EXPERIMENTS  IN  LIFE  AND  POETRY.  35 

deplorable ;  but  he  is  too  good  a  judge  of  letters  to  extend 
his  contempt  to  their  writings.  He  was  solidly  and  fa- 
miliarly versed  in  the  great  French  writers  from  Montaigne 
and  Rabelais  down,  and  though  he  did  scant  justice  to 
Voltaire,  and  saw  the  weakness  rather  than  the  strength 
of  the  French  poetical  drama,  he  thought  many  of  their 
prose  writers  second  only,  if  second  at  all,  to  the  best  of 
antiquity.  The  style  of  Rousseau  in  particular  he  thought 
incomparable.  He  held  also  in  high  admiration  the  great 
French  oratorical  divines,  and  felt  and  valued  to  the  full 
the  combined  pregnancy  and  simplicity  of  thought  and 
utterance  which  distinguish  those  two  pre-eminent  classics 
in  verse  and  prose  respectively,  La  Fontaine  and  Pascal, 
"  Do  we  find  in  Pascal  anything  of  the  lying,  gasconading, 
vapouring  Frenchmen  ?  On  the  contrary,  we  find,  in  de- 
spite of  the  most  miserable  language,  all  the  sober  and  re- 
tired graces  of  style,  all  the  confident  ease  of  manliness 
and  strength,  with  an  honest  but  not  abrupt  simplicity 
which  appeals  to  the  reason,  but  is  also  admitted  to  the 
heart." 

To  return  to  the  history  of  Landor's  occupations,  in 
1800  he  had  published,  in  the  shape  of  an  unbound  quarto 
pamphlet  of  fourteen  pages,  a  collection  of  short  "  Poems 
from  the  Arabic  and  Persian,"  written  in  irregular,  un- 
rhymed  verses,  principally  anapaestic.  An  autograph  note 
added  in  old  age  to  his  own  copy  says,  "  I  wrote  these 
poems  after  reading  what  had  been  translated  from  the 
Arabic  and  Persian  by  Sir  W.  Jones  and  Dr.  Nott."  In 
his  preface  Landor  professes  to  have  followed  a  French 
version  of  the  originals,  but  neither  such  version  nor  such 
originals  are  known  to  exist;  and  it  may  be  safely  infer- 
red that  both  the  statement  of  the  preface  and  the  elabo- 
rate notes  appended  to  each  poem  are  so  much  mystifica- 


36  LANDOR.  [chap. 

tion.  The  pamphlet  is  of  extreme  rarity,  and  its  contents 
were  not  reprinted  nntil  1858,  I  give,  by  way  of  exam- 
ple, the  following  characteristic  and  taking  little  piece  with 
which  it  concludes : 

"  Oh  Rahdi,  where  is  happiness  ? 
Look  from  your  arcade,  the  sun  rises  from  Busrah ; 
Go  thither,  it  rises  from  Ispahan. 
Alas  !  it  rises  neither  from  Ispahan  nor  Busrah, 
But  from  an  ocean  impenetrable  to  the  diver. 
Oh,  Rahdi,  the  sun  is  happiness." 

To  which  Landor  adds  a  note  to  say  that  "  this  poem  re- 
sembles not  those  ridiculous  quibbles  which  the  English 
in  particular  call  epigrams,  but  rather,  abating  some  little 
for  Orientalism^  those  exquisite  Eidyllia,  those  carvings 
as  it  were  on  ivory  or  on  gems,  which  are  modestly  called 
epigrams  by  the  Greeks." 

This  little  publication,  as  was  natural  from  its  shape  and 
character,  attracted  no  attention,  nor  did  Landor  attempt 
anything  in  the  same  manner  afterwards.  Two  years 
later,  immediately  before  his  expedition  to  Paris  in  1802, 
he  put  forth  another  small  volume  under  the  title  of 
"Poetry,  by  the  author  of  Gebir."  This  contains  two 
short  narrative  poems  in  blank  verse — Chrysaor  and  the 
Phocceans,  besides  a  few  miscellaneous  lyrics  in  Latin  and 
English.  Landor's  mind  was  still  occupied  with  the 
mythic  past  of  Baetic  Spain;  and  Chrysaor  is  an  episode 
of  the  war  between  Gods  and  Titans,  in  which  Gades 
(Cadiz)  is  severed  from  the  mainland  by  Neptune  at  the 
request  of  Jove.  Both  in  subject  and  in  treatment  it 
seems  to  foreshadow  the  Hyperion  of  Keats,  except  that 
the  manner  of  the  elder  poet  is  more  massive,  more  con- 
centrated, and  proportionately  less  lucid  than  that  of  the 


u]  EXPERIMENTS  IN  LIFE  AND  POETRY.  37 

younger.  To  my  mind  Chrysaor  is  Landor's  finest  piece 
of  narrative  writing  in  blank  verse ;  less  monotonous  in 
its  movement  than  Gebir,  more  lofty  and  impassioned  than 
any  of  the  later  "Hellenics"  with  which  it  was  afterwards 
incorporated.  At  the  time  of  its  publication  this  poem 
made  a  deep  impression  upon  Wordsworth.*  The  Pho- 
cceans,  on  the  other  hand,  which  tells  of  the  foundation  of 
the  colony  of  Massilia  by  emigrants  of  that  race — a  subject 
which  had  been  in  Landor's  mind  since  Oxford  days — is  so 
fragmentary  and  so  obscure  as  to  baffle  the  most  tenacious 
student.  It  contains,  like  all  Landor's  early  poetry,  im- 
ages both  condensed  and  vivid,  as  well  as  weighty  reflec- 
tions weightily  expressed;  but  in  its  sequence  and  inci- 
dents the  poem  is,  to  me  at  least,  unintelligible.  So  at  the 
time  it  seems  to  have  been  found  by  Southey,  who  has- 
tened to  review  this  new  publication  by  the  unknown  ob- 
ject of  his  previous  enthusiasm,  but  could  find  little  to  say 
in  its  praise. 

Another  task  which  occupied  Landor  at  this  time  was 
the  re-editing  of  Gebir,  in  conjunction  with  his  brother 
Robert,  then  at  Oxford.  In  order  to  make  the  poem  more 
popular,  the  brothers  reprinted  it  with  arguments  and  notes ; 
some  of  the  latter  being  intended  to  clear  up  difliculties, 
others  to  modify  points  concerning  which,  as  for  instance, 
the  character  of  Buonaparte,  the  author  had  changed  his 
mind.  At  the  same  time  they  published  separately  a  Latin 
translation,  which,  together  with  a  scholarly  and  vigorous 
preface  in  the  same  language,  Walter  had  prepared  express- 
ly at  Robert's  instigation  by  way  of  helping  the  piece  into 

'  In  the  final  collected  edition  of  Landor's  writings  (ISYB)  Chry- 
saor is  inadvertently  printed  as  part  of  the  same  poem  with  Regene- 
ration,  whidh  was  written  twenty  years  later,  and  with  which  it  has 
nothing  at  all  to  do. 

r:  'y  O  w  C 
i)  4  ''^'  ^  b 


38  LANDOK.  [chap, 

popularity.     These,  it  must  be  remembered,  were  the  days 
of  Vincent   Bourne,  Bobus   Smith,  Frere,  Canning,  and 
Wellesley,  when  the  art  of  Latin  versification  was  studied, 
practised,  and  enjoyed  not  in  scholastic  circles  alone,  but  by  a 
select  public  of  the  most  distinguished  Englishmen ;  so  that 
there  was  not  quite  so  much  either  of  pedantry  or  of  sim- 
plicity in  the  fraternal  enterprise  as  appeared  at  first  sight. 
At  the  end  of  the  volume  of  "  Poetry  "  published  in 
1802  there  had  already  appeared  one  or  two  lyrics  refer- 
ring, though  not  yet  under  that  name,  to  the  lady  whom 
Landor  afterwards  called  lanthe.     More  were  appended, 
and  this  time  with  the  name,  to  yet  another  experimental 
.  scrap  of  a  volume  in  verse,  having  for  its  chief  feature  a 
tale  in  eight  -  syllable  rhyme  called  Gunlaug  and  Helga, 
suggested   by  Herbert's   translation   from   the  Icelandic. 
This  appeared  in  1804  or  1805,  while  Robert  Landor  was 
still  at  Oxford,  and  by  him,  if  by  no  one  else,  was  duti- 
fully reviewed  in  a  periodical  of  his  own  creation,  the  Ox- 
ford Review.     From  these  years,  about  1802 — 1806,  dates 
the  chief  part  of  Landor's  verses  written  to  or  about  lanthe. 
Whether  in  the  form  of  praise,  of  complaint,  or  of  appeal, 
these  verses  are  for  the  most  part  general  in  their  terms, 
and  do  not  enable  us  definitely  to  retrace  the  course  of  an 
attachment  on  which  Landor  never  ceased  to  look  back  as 
the  strongest  of  bis  life,  and  for  the  object  of  which  he 
continued  until  her  death  to  entertain  the  most  chivalrous 
and  tender  friendship.     Landor's  verses  in  this  class,  al- 
though not  in  the  first  rank  of  love -poetry,  nevertheless 
express  much  contained  passion  in  their  grave,  concise  way, 
and  seldom  fail  to  include,  within  the  polished  shell  of 
verse,  a  solid  and  appropriate  kernel,  however  minute,  of 
thought.    Here,  in  a  somewhat  depressed  and  ominous  key, 
is  a  good  example  of  the  style : 


II.]  EXPERIMENTS  IN  LITE  AND  POETRY.  39 

"  I  held  her  hand,  the  pledge  of  bliss, 
Her  hand  that  trembled  and  withdrew, 
She  bent  her  head  before  my  kiss — 
My  heart  was  sure  that  hers  was  true. 

"  Now  I  have  told  her  I  must  part, 

She  shakes  my  hand,  she  bids  adieu, 
Nor  shuns  the  kiss — alas,  my  heart  I 
Hers  never  was  the  heart  for  you." 

In  other  pieces  we  get  a  more  outspoken  tale  of  past  de- 
lights and  of  the  pain  of  present  separation.  The  lady- 
went  abroad,  and  the  restlessness  of  Landor's  life  increased. 
He  moved  frequently  between  Wales,  Bath,  Clifton,  War- 
wick, Oxford,  and  London.  We  find  him  in  close  corre- 
spondence, generally  on  subjects  of  literature  or  scholar 
ship,  with  his  friends  Gary  and  Birch.  Another  of  his  in- 
timate friends  of  the  years  just  preceding  these  had  been 
Rough,  a  young  lawyer  married  to  a  daughter  of  Wilkes, 
and  then  of  a  shining  promise  which  smouldered  off  later 
into  disappointment  and  mediocrity.  With  him  Landor 
on  slight  occasion  or  none  had  about  this  time  one  of  his 
impulsive,  irreconcilable  quarrels.  In  the  meantime  his 
father's  health  was  gradually  and  painfully  breaking  up. 
It  was  evident  that  Walter  would  soon  come  into  posses- 
sion of  the  patrimonial  portion  of  his  inheritance.  He  did 
not  wait  that  event  to  outrun  his  allowance.  We  find  him 
buying  a  horse  one  day,  a  Titian  another,  a  Hogarth  on  the 
third ;  and  generally  beginning  to  assume  the  habits  of  a 
gentleman  of  property  and  taste.  He  was  full  at  the  same 
time  of  lofty  schemes,  literary  and  other.  The  expedition 
of  the  fleet  under  Nelson  called  forth  some  verses  of  which 
we  cannot  but  regret  the  loss,  and  in  which  the  writer 
seemed,  to  quote  the  friend  to  whom  he  addressed  them, 


40  LANDOR.  [chap.  u. 

"  to  have  been  inspired  by  the  prophetic  spirit  ascribed  to 
the  poets  of  old,  and  to  have  anticipated  the  glorious  vic- 
tory of  Nelson,  the  news  of  which  had  reached  me  just  be- 
fore I  received  them."  The  victory  in  question  was  the 
battle  of  Trafalgar,  and  between  the  date  of  this  letter, 
November  11, 1805,  and  Christmas  of  the  same  year.  Dr. 
Landor  had  died,  and  Walter  had  come  into  possession  of 
his  patrimony. 


CHAPTER  IIL 

MORE    EXPERIMENTS    AND     MARRIAGE BATH SPAIN  — ' 

LLANTHONY COUNT    JULIAN. 

[1805—1814.] 

As  soon  as  he  was  his  own  master,  Landor  proceeded  to 
enlarge  his  style  of  living  in  proportion  to  his  increased 
means,  or  rather  beyond  such  proportion  as  it  turned  out. 
He  continued  to  make  Bath  his  headquarters,  and,  exter- 
nally at  least,  lived  there  for  some  time  the  life  of  any  oth- 
er young  (although,  indeed,  he  was  not  now  so  very  young) 
Fortunio.  His  political  opinions  were  a  -source  of  some 
scandal,  and  it  was  remarked  that  any  other  man  talking 
as  Landor  talked  would  have  been  called  to  account  for  it 
over  and  over  again.  Once  or  twice,  indeed,  it  seems  as 
if  collisions  had  only  been  averted  by  the  good  oflBces  of 
friends;  but  there  was  something  about  Landor  which 
did  not  encourage  challenge ;  partly,  no  doubt,  his  obvious 
intrepidity,  and  partly,  we  may  infer,  his  habitual  exact- 
ness on  the  point  of  personal  courtesy  even  in  the  midst 
of  his  most  startling  sallies.  Perhaps,  too,  republicanism 
seemed  to  lose  something  of  its  odiousness  in  a  gentleman 
of  Landor's  known  standing  and  fortune.  Common  re- 
port exaggerated  at  this  time  his  wealth  and  his  expecta- 
tions, and  his  own  prodigality  in  the  matter  of  horses, 
carriages,  servants,  plate,  pictures,  and  the  like,  lent  coun- 
D     3 


42  LANDOR.  [chap. 

tenance  to  the  exaggeration.  In  his  personal  habits,  it 
must  at  the  same  time  be  noted,  Landor  was  now,  as  al- 
ways, frugal.  He  drank  water,  or  only  the  lightest  wines, 
and  ate  fastidiously  indeed,  but  sparely.  All  his  life  he 
would  touch  no  viands  but  such  as  were  both  choice  and 
choicely  dressed,  and  he  preferred  to  eat  them  alone,  or 
in  the  company  of  one  or  two,  regarding  crowded  repasts 
as  fit  only  for  savages.  "  To  dine  in  company  with  more 
than  two  is  a  Gaulish  and  a  German  thing.  I  can  hardly 
bring  myself  to  believe  that  I  have  eaten  in  concert  with 
twenty ;  so  barbarous  and  herdlike  a  practice  does  it  now 
appear  to  me,  such  an  incentive  to  drink  much  and  talk 
loosely — not  to  add,  such  a  necessity  to  speak  loud — 
which  is  clownish  and  odious  in  the  extreme."  The 
speaker  in  the  above  passage  is  LucuUus,  but  the  senti- 
ments are  Landor's  own.  Neither  does  Landor  seem  at 
any  time  to  have  taken  trouble  about  his  dress ;  having, 
indeed,  in  later  life  come  to  be  conspicuously  negligent 
in  that  particular.  In  these  early  Bath  days  we  have  to 
picture  him  to  ourselves  simply  as  a  solid,  massive,  ener- 
getic presence,  in  society  sometimes  silent  and  abstracted, 
sometimes  flaming  with  eloquence  and  indignation ;  his 
figure  robust  and  commanding,  but  not  tall,  his  face  prin- 
cipally noticeable  for  its  bold,  full,  blue-grey  eyes  and 
strong,  high-arched  brows,  with  dark  hair  falling  over 
and  half  concealing  the  forehead,  and  a  long,  stubborn 
upper  lip,  and  aggressive  set  of  the  jaw,  betokening  truly 
enough  the  passionate  temper  of  the  man,  yet  in  conver- 
sation readily  breaking  up  into  the  sunniest,  most  genial 
smile. 

Such  as  he  was,  then,  Landor  was  in  high  request  for 
the  time  being  in  the  assembly-rooms  both  of  Bath  and 
Clifton.     These,  no  doubt,  were  the  days  in  which,  as  he 


ui.]  BATH.  48 

wrote  long  afterwards  to  Lady  Blessington,  he  suffered  so 
much  annoyance  from  his  bad  dancing.  "  How  grievous- 
ly has  my  heart  ached,"  such  is  his  large  way  of  putting 
it, "  when  others  were  in  the  full  enjoyment  of  that  rec- 
reation which  I  had  no  right  even  to  partake  of."  Nev- 
ertheless, Landor  was  kindly  looked  on  by  the  fair,  and 
only  too  impetuously  ready  to  answer  sigh  with  sigh. 
His  flirtations  were  numerous  and  were  carried  far.  There 
is  even  not  wanting,  in  his  dealings  with  and  his  language 
concerning  women  during  this  brief  period,  a  touch  of 
commonplace  rakishness,  a  shadow  of  vulgarity  nowhere 
else  to  be  discerned  in  the  ways  of  this  most  unvulgar  of 
mankind.  But  such  shadows  were  merely  on  the  surface. 
Inwardly,  Landor's  letters  show  him  ill  content,  and  long- 
ing, if  he  only  knew  how  to  find  it,  for  something  high 
and  steadfast  in  his  life.  He  was  given  as  much  as  ever 
to  solid  reading  and  reflection,  and  stirred  in  a  moment 
to  wholesome  and  manly  sorrow  at  the  loss  of  a  friend 
or  the  breach  of  an  old  association.  A  Mrs.  Lambe,  whom 
he  had  warmly  regarded  from  boyhood,  died  about  this 
time  at  Warwick,  and  soon  afterwards  came  the  news  of 
the  sudden  death  in  India  of  Rose  Aylmer,  the  friend  of 
Welsh  days  to  whose  casual  loan  Landor,  as  we  saw,  had 
been  indebted  for  the  first  hint  of  Gebir.  By  both  these 
losses  Landor  was  deeply  moved,  by  that  of  Rose  Aylmer 
in  especial  his  thoughts  being  for  days  and  nights  entire- 
ly possessed.  During  his  vigils  he  wrote  the  first  draft  of 
the  little  elegy,  "  carved  as  it  were  in  ivory  or  in  gems,** 
which  in  its  later  form  became  famous : 

"  Ah,  what  avails  the  sceptred  race  ? 

Ah,  what  the  form  divine  ? 

What  every  virtue,  every  grace  ? 

Rose  Aylmer,  all  were  thine. 
27 


44  LANDOR.  [chap. 

"  Rose  Aylmer,  whom  these  wakeful  eyes 
May  weep,  but  never  see, 
A  night  of  naeraories  and  of  sighs 
I  consecrate  to  thee." 

Just,  natural,  simple,  severely  and  at  the  same  time  haunt- 
ingly  melodious,  however  baldly  or  stoically  they  may 
strike  the  ear  attuned  to  more  high-pitched  lamentations, 
these  are  the  lines  which  made  afterwards  so  deep  an  im- 
pression upon  Charles  Lamb.  Tipsy  or  sober,  it  is  re- 
ported of  that  impressionable  spirit  a  few  years  before  his 
death,  he  would  always  be  repeating  Rose  Aylmer.  The 
effect  obtained  by  the  iteration  of  the  young  girl's  two 
beautiful  names  at  the  beginning  of  the  fourth  and  fifth 
lines  is  an  afterthought.  In  place  of  this  simple,  musical 
invocation,  the  fourth  line  had  originally  begun  with  a 
lame  explanatory  conjunction,  "For,  Aylmer,"  and  the 
fifth  with  a  commonplace  adjective,  "  Sweet  Aylmer."  In 
the  seventh  line  "  memories  "  is  a  correction  for  the  allit- 
erative and  vaguer  "  sorrows  "  of  the  first  draft.  Landor's 
affection  for  the  same  lost  friend  and  companion  is  again 
expressed,  we  may  remember,  in  another  poem  of  a  much 
later  date  headed  Abertawy,  which  furnishes  a  good  exam- 
ple of  his  ordinary  manner,  part  playful,  part  serious,  and 
not  free  from  slips  both  of  taste  and  workmanship,  in  this 
kind  of  autobiographical  reminiscence,  and  which  ends 
with  the  following  gravely  .tender  lines : 

"  Where  is  she  now  ?     Call'd  far  away 
By  one  she  dared  not  disobey. 
To  those  proud  halls,  for  youth  unfit, 
Where  princes  stand  and  judges  sit.  m 

Where  Ganges  rolls  his  widest  wave 
She  dropt  her  blossom  in  the  grave ; 
Her  noble  name  she  never  changed. 
Nor  was  her  nobler  heart  estranged." 


III.]  BATH.  45 

The  losses  above  mentioned  and  others  occurring  in  the 
circle  of  Landor's  friends  about  this  time,  1805 — 1806, 
prompted  him  to  compose  several  pieces  of  the  elegiac 
kind,  both  in  English  and  Latin,  which  he  collected  and 
published  under  the  title  Simonidea.  But  these  elegiac 
pieces  did  not  stand  alone.  They  were  accompanied  by- 
others  in  right  of  which  the  volume  might  just  as  well 
have  been  called  Anacreontica,  namely,  a  selection,  made  by 
lanthe,  of  love-poems  addressed  in  English  to  herself,  be- 
sides some  Latin  verses  of  so  free  a  tenour  that  Landor 
was  by-and-by  ashamed  of  having  published  them.  "I 
printed  whatever  was  marked  with  a  pencil  by  a  woman 
who  loved  me,  and  I  consulted  all  her  caprices.  I  added 
some  Latin  poetry  of  my  own,  more  pure  in  its  Latinity 
than  its  sentiment.  When  you  read  the  Simonidea,  pity 
and  forgive  me."  Several  of  Landor's  early  writings  are 
now  excessively  rare,  more  than  one,  indeed,  being  only 
known  to  exist  in  a  solitary  example ;  but  of  the  Simoni- 
dea, so  far  as  I  have  been  able  to  ascertain,  not  even  a  sin- 
gle copy  has  been  preserved. 

Soon  after  this,  moved,  it  would  seem,  partly  by  his 
strained  finances  and  partly  by  his  sanguine  imagination, 
Landor  conceived  the  plan  of  alienating  his  paternal  estate 
in  Staffordshire,  in  order  to  acquire  another  yielding,  or 
capable  of  being  made  to  yield,  larger  returns  in  a  wilder 
part  of  the  country.  He  turned  his  thoughts  first  towards 
the  lakes.  Here  he  made  a  tour  in  the  spring  of  1807, 
found  an  estate  which  enchanted  him,  beside  the  small 
romantic  Lake  of  Loweswater,  and  at  once  began  negotia- 
^ons  for  its  purchase.  These  falling  through,  he  in  the 
next  year  pitched  upon  another  and  a  very  noble  property, 
which  was  for  sale  in  a  country  nearer  to  his  own  accus- 
tomed haunts,  that,  namely,  of  Llanthony,  on  the  Welsh 


46  LANDOR.  [chap. 

border.  To  his  overwhelming  desire  to  become  lord  of 
Llanthony  all  impediments  had  now  to  give  way,  with 
what  consequences  to  himself  and  others  we  shall  see. 

But  before  the  complicated  arrangements  connected  with 
this  purchase  were  completed,  events  of  great  interest  in 
Landor's  life  had  come  to  pass.  First,  there  was  the  begin- 
ning of  his  acquaintance  with  Southey.  Of  all  English 
writers  of  that  age,  they  were  the  two  who  most  resembled 
each  other  by  their  science  in  the  technical  craft  of  letters, 
by  their  high  and  classical  feeling  for  the  honour  and  dig- 
nity of  the  English  language,  and  by  the  comprehensive- 
ness and  solidity  of  their  reading.  Ever  since  Southey 
had  discovered  that  Landor  was  the  author  of  Gebir,  and 
Landor  that  Southey  was  its  admiring  critic,  a  precon- 
ceived sympathy  had  sprung  up  between  the  two  men. 
Since  then  Southey  had  written  Madoc,  the  first,  and  Tha- 
laba,  the  second  of  his  mythological  epics,  and  in  Madoc 
had  avowedly  profited  by  Landor's  example,  both  as  to  the 
way  of  seeinff,  as  he  put  it,  for  the  purposes  of  poetry,  and 
as  to  the  management  of  his  blank  verse.  On  his  tour  in 
the  lake  country,  Landor,  who  was  no  seeker  of  acquaint- 
ances, and  indeed  once  boasted,  in  his  serene  way,  that  he 
had  never  accepted  a  letter  of  introduction  in  his  life,  had 
missed,  and  expressed  his  regret  at  missing,  the  opportu- 
nity of  meeting  Southey. 

It  was  in  Sbuthey's  native  Bristol,  at  the  lodgings  of  his 
friend  Danvers,  that  he  and  Landor  met  for  the  first  time 
in  the  spring  of  1808.  They  took  to  each  other  at  once, 
and  a  friendship  was.  formed  which  lasted  without  break 
or  abatement  for  thirty  years.  In  many  of  their  opinions 
Landor  and  Southey  differed  much  already,  and  their  dif- 
ferences were  destined  to  increase  as  tinle  went  on,  but 
differences  of  opinion  brought  no  shadow  between  them. 


nt]  SOUTHEY.  41 

Each  seems  instinctively  to  have  recognized  whatever  was 
sterling,  loyal,  and  magnanimous  in  the  other's  nature. 
Each,  though  this  is  a  minor  matter,  heartily  respected  in 
the  other  the  scrupulous  and  accomplished  literary  work- 
man. Each  probably  liked  and  had  a  fellow-feeling  for 
the  other's  boyish  exuberance  of  vitality  and  proneness  to 
exaggeration  and  denunciation.  For  it  is  to  be  noted  that 
Landor's  intimacies  were  almost  always  with  men  of  em- 
phatic and  declamatory  eloquence  like  his  own.  Parr,  the 
most  honoured  friend  of  his  youth,  Southey  and  Francis 
Hare,  the  most  cherished  of  his  manhood,  were  all  three 
Olympian  talkers  in  their  degree.  But  Landor  and  his 
kindred  Olympians,  it  seems,  understood  each  other,  and 
knew  how  to  thunder  and  lighten  without  collision.  These 
last,  as  it  happens,  are  the  very  words  afterwards  used  by 
Southey  in  preparing  a  common  friend  for  the  kind  of  per- 
sonage he  would  meet  in  Landor.  "  He  does  more  than 
any  of  the  gods  of  all  my  mythologies,  for  his  very  words 
are  thunder  and  lightning,  such  is  the  power  and  splendour 
with  which  they  burst  out.  But  all  is  perfectly  natural ; 
there  is  no  trick  about  him,  no  preaching,  no  playing  off." 
If  we  thus  have  Southey's  testimony  at  once  to  the  im- 
pressiveness  and  to  the  integrity  of  Landor's  personality, 
we  have  Landor's  to  "  the  genial  voice  and  radiant  eye "  of 
Southey,  besides  a  hundred  other  expressions  of  affection 
for  his  person  and  admiration  for  his  character  and  his 
powers. 

With  the  immediate  result  of  his  own  and  Landor's  first 
conversation  Southey  could  not  fail  to  be  gratified.  He  had 
been  forced  of  late  to  abandon  his  most  cherished  task, 
the  continuance  of  his  series  of  mythologic  epics.  The 
plain  reason  was  that  he  could  not  afford  to  spend  time  on 
work  so  little  remunerative.     Landor,  when  Southey  told 


48  LANDOR.  [chap. 

him  this,  was  in  an  instant  all  generosity  and  delicacy,  beg- 
ging to  be  allowed  to  print  future  productions  of  the  kind 
at  his  own  expense — "  as  many  as  you  will  write,  and  as 
many  copies  as  you  please."  In  all  this  there  was  not  the 
least  taint  of  patronage  or  condescension  on  the  part  of 
the  magnificent  young  squire  and  scholar  towards  the 
struggling,  although  already  distinguished,  man  of  letters, 
his  senior  by  only  a  year,  Landor  was  as  incapable  of  as- 
suming superiority  on  any  grounds  but  those  of  character 
and  irftellect  as  of  enduring  such  assumption  in  others. 
Southey,  as  it  turned  out,  only  made  practical  use  of  his 
friend's  offer  to  the  extent  of  allowing  him  to  buy  a  con- 
siderable number  of  copies  of  Kehama  when  that  work  ap- 
peared. But  the  encouragement  was  everything  to  him, 
and  had  for  its  consequence  that  Kehama,  already  begun 
and  dropped,  was  industriously  resumed  and  finished,  and 
followed  in  due  course  by  Roderick,  the  manuscript  of 
either  poem  being  dutifully  sent  off  in  successive  instal- 
ments as  it  was  written  for  Landor  to  read  and  criticise. 
At  the  same  time  an  active  and  intimate  correspondence 
sprung  up  between  the  two  men,  and  in  after-years  sup- 
plied, indeed,  the  chief  aliment  of  their  friendship,  their 
meetings  being,  from  the  force  of  circumstances,  rare. 

The  next  event  in  Landor's  life  was  his  sudden  and  brief 
appearance  as  a  man  of  action  on  the  theatre  of  European 
war.  Napoleon  Buonaparte  had  just  carried  into  effect  the 
infamous  plot  which  he  had  conceived  in  order  to  make 
himself  master  of  Spain  and  Portugal.  But  before  his 
brother  Joseph  had  time  to  be  proclaimed  king  at  Madrid, 
all  Spain  was  up  in  arms.  Against  the  French  armies  of 
occupation  there  sprang  up  from  one  end  of  the  country 
to  the  other  first  a  tumultuary  and  then  an  organized  re- 
sistance.    So  swift,  eflScient,  and  unanimous  a  rising  had 


m.]  SPAIN.  49 

nowhere  else  been  witnessed.  A  people,  it  seemed,  had  at 
last  been  found  with  manhood  enough  in  their  veins  to 
refuse  the  yoke  of  France,  and  in  the  hearts  of  all  friends 
of  liberty  despair  began  to  give  way  to  hope.  How  much 
of  anarchical  self-seeking  and  distracted,  pusillanimous 
intrigue  in  reality  lay  latent  in  these  patriot  bosoms  was 
little  suspected  in  the  enthusiasm  of  the  hour.  In  Eng- 
land especially,  the  Spaniards  were  passionately  acclaimed 
as  a  race  of  heroes,  on  whose  victory  depended  the  very 
salvation  of  the  world.  Instant  help,  both  in  men  and 
money,  was  despatched  to  the  insurgents  by  the  English 
Government.  Poets  and  orators  extolled  their  deeds ;  vol- 
unteers pressed  to  join  their  standards.  While  Words- 
worth, Southey,  and  Coleridge,  from  the  seclusion  of  their 
lakes  and  mountains,  did  their  utmost  to  swell  the  tide 
of  popular  emotion,  Landor  on  his  part  was  not  content 
with  words.  One  evening  at  Brighton  he  found  himself 
"  preaching  a  crusade "  to  an  audience  of  two  Irish  gentle- 
men, who  caught  his  ardour,  and  the  three  determined  to 
start  for  Spain  without  more  ado.  Early  in  August  they 
set  sail  from  Falmouth  for  Corunna,  which  was  the  seat  of 
an  English  mission  under  Stuart,  afterwards  ambassador 
in  Paris.  From  Corunna  Landor  addressed  a  letter  to  the 
provincial  government,  enclosing  a  gift  of  ten  thousand 
reals  for  the  relief  of  the  inhabitants  of  Venturada,  a  town 
burnt  by  the  French,  and  at  the  same  time  proclaiming 
that  he  would  equip  at  his  own  cost,  and  accompany  to 
the  field,  aU  volunteers  up  to  the  number  of  a  thousand 
who  might  choose  to  join  him.  Both  gift  and  proclama- 
tion were  thankfully  acknowledged ;  a  body  of  volunteers 
was  promptly  organized ;  and  Landor  marched  with  them 
through  Leon  and  Gallicia  to  join  the  Spanish  army  under 
Blake  in  the  mountains  of  Biscay.  In  the  meantime  his 
3* 


60  LANDOR.  [chap. 

incurably  jealous  and  inflammable  spirit  of  pride,  inflam- 
mable especially  in  contact  with  those  in  office  or  authori- 
ty, had  caught  fire  at  a  depreciatory  phrase  dropped  by 
the  English  envoy,  Stuart,  at  one  of  the  meetings  of  the 
Junta.  Stuart's  expression  had  not  really  referred  to  Lan- 
dor  at  all,  but  he  chose  to  apply  it  to  himself,  and  on  his 
march  accordingly  indited  and  made  public  an  indignant 
letter  of  remonstrance. 

To  the  groundless  disgust  which  Landor  had  thus  con- 
ceived and  vented  at  a  fancied  slight,  was  soon  added  that 
with  which  he  was  more  reasonably  inspired  by  the  in- 
competence and  sloth  of  the  Spanish  general,  Blake.  He 
remained  with  the  army  of  the  North  for  several  idle 
weeks  in  the  neighbourhood  of  Reynosa  and  Aguilar.  He 
was  very  desirous  of  seeing  Madrid,  but  denied  himself  the 
excursion  for  fear  of  missing  a  battle,  which  after  all  was 
never  fought.  It  was  not  until  after  the  end  of  Septem- 
ber, when  the  convention  between  Sir  Hew  Dalryraple 
and  Junot  had  been  signed  in  Portugal,  and  when  Blake's 
army  broke  up  its  quarters  at  Reynosa,  that  Landor,  his 
band  of  volunteers  having  apparently  melted  away  in  the 
meanwhile,  separated  himself  from  the  Spanish  forces  and 
returned  suddenly  to  England.  He  narrowly  escaped  be- 
ing taken  prisoner  in  the  endeavour  to  travel  by  way  of 
Bilbao,  which  had  then  just  been  re-entered  by  the  French 
under  Ney.  The  thanks  of  the  supreme  Junta  for  his 
services  were  in  course  of  time  conveyed  to  him  at  home, 
together  with  the  title  and  commission  of  an  honorary 
colonel  in  the  Spanish  army. 

Landor  had  departed  leaving  his  countrymen  in  a  frenzy 
of  enthusiasm.  He  found  them  on  his  return  in  a  frenzy 
of  indignation  and  disgust.  The  military  compromise  just 
eflPected  in  Portugal  was  denounced  by  popular  clamour  in 


ni.]  SPAIN.  61 

terms  of  unmeasured  fury,  and  not  by  popular  clamour 
only.     Men  of  letters  and  of  thought  are  habitually  too 
much  given  to  declaiming  at  their  ease  against  the  delin- 
quencies of  men  of  action  and  affairs.    The  inevitable  fric- 
tion of  practical  politics  generates  heat  enough  already, 
and  the  oflBce  of  the  political  thinker  and  critic  should 
be  to  supply  not  heat  but  light.     The  diflBculties  which 
attend  his  own  unmolested  task,  the  task  of  seeking  after 
and  proclaiming  salutary  truths,  should  teach  him  to  make 
allowance  for  the  far  more  urgent  difficulties  which  beset 
the  politician,  the  man  obliged,  amid  the  clash  of  interests 
and  temptations,  to  practise  from  hand  to  mouth,  and  at 
his  peril,  the  most  uncertain  and  at  the  same  time  the 
most  indispensable  of  the  experimental  arts.     The  early 
years  of  this  century  in  England  may  not  have  been  years 
remarkable  for   wise   or   consistent  statesmanship ;   they 
were  certainly  remarkable  for  the  frantic  vituperation  of 
those  in  power  by  those  who  looked  on.     The  writers  of 
the  Lake  school  were  at  this  time  as  loud  and  as  little 
reasonable  in  their  outcries  as  any  group  of  men  in  the 
kingdom,  and  Southey  was  the  loudest  of  them  all.     His 
letters,  and  especially  his  letters  to  Landor,  on  the  public 
questions  of  the  hour,  can  hardly  be  read  even  now  with- 
out a  twinge  of  humiliation  at  the  spectacle  of  a  man  of 
his  knowledge,  sincerity,  and  candour  giving  way  to  so 
idle  a  fury  of  misjudgment  and  malediction.     Landor,  on 
his  part,  is  moderate  by  comparison,  and  has  a  better  hold 
both  of  facts  and  principles,  although  he  is  ready  to  go 
great  lengths  with  his  friend  in  condemnation  of  the  Eng- 
lish ministers  and  commanders. 

In  the  succeeding  winter  and  spring  nothing  but  Spain 
was  in  men's  minds  or  conversation.  After  the  victory 
and  death  of  Sir  John  Moore  at  Corunna  in  January,  1 809, 


62  LANDOR.  [chap. 

Landor  was  for  a  while  on  the  point  of  sailing  for  that 
country  as  a  volunteer  for  the  second  time.  Eventually, 
however,  he  forbore,  private  affairs  in  connexion  with  his 
new  property  at  2/lanthony  helping  among  other  things  to 
detain  him.  In  order  to  effect  this  purchase  Landor  had 
required  as  much  as  20,000/.  over  and  above  the  sum  real- 
ized by  the  sale  of  his  Staffordshire  estate.  For  this  pur- 
pose he  made  up  his  mind  to  sell  Tachbrook,  the  smaller 
of  the  two  properties  in  Warwickshire  destined  to  devolve 
to  him  at  the  death  of  his  mother.  Her  consent  was  nec- 
essary to  this  step,  as  well  as  that  of  his  brothers,  and  an 
act  of  parliament  authorizing  the  breach  of  the  entail. 
All  these  matters,  together  with  some  minor  arrangements 
protecting  the  interests  of  Mrs.  Landor  and  her  other  chil- 
dren by  charges  on  the  new  estate,  and  the  like,  were  got 
through  in  the  summer  of  this  year  (1809).  Early  in  the 
autumn  of  the  same  year  we  find  Landor  established  in 
temporary  quarters  on  his  new  property.  It  was  a  wild 
and  striking  country  that  he  had  chosen  for  his  future 
home.  Most  readers  are  probably  familiar  with  the  dis- 
tant aspect  of  those  mountains,  whose  sombre  masses  and 
sweeping  outlines  arrest  the  eye  of  the  spectator  looking 
westward  over  the  Welsh  marches  from  the  summit  of  the 
Malvern  hills.  These  are  the  Black  or  Hatterill  moun- 
tains of  Monmouthshire  and  Brecknockshire.  Of  all  their 
recesses  the  most  secluded  and  most  romantic,  although 
not  the  most  remote,  is  the  valley  of  Ewias,  within  which 
stands  the  ruined  priory  of  Llanthony,'    This  valley  winds 

'  Pronounce  Llanthony ;  said  to  be  short  for  Llandevi  Nanthodeni, 
i.e.,  church  of  St.  David  by  the  water  of  Hodeni.  The  early  history 
of  this  famous  border  priory  is  better  known  than  that  of  almost 
any  other  foundation  of  the  same  kind ;  see  the  articles  of  Mr.  Rob- 
erts in  ArchcBologia  Cambrensis,  vol.  i.,  No.  3,  and  of  Mr.  Freeman, 


m.]  LLANTHONT.  88 

for  some  twelve  miles  between  two  high  continuous  ridges, 
of  which  the  sides  are  now  flowing  and  now  precipitous, 
here  broken  into  wooded  dingles,  here  receding  into  grassy 
amphitheatres,  and  there  heaped  with  the  copse -grown 
ruins  of  ancient  landslips.     Along  its  bed  there  races  or 
loiters  according  to  the  weather — and  it  is  a  climate  noto- 
rious for  rain  —  the  stream  Hodeni,  Honddu,  or  Hondy. 
The  opening  of  the  valley  is  towards  the  south,  and  was 
blocked  in  ancient  times  with  thickets  and  morasses,  so 
that  its  only  approach  was  over  one  or  other  of  its  lofty 
lateral  ridges.     In  those  days  the  scene  was  wont  to  lay 
upon  the  few  who  ever  entered  it  the  spell  of  solitude  and 
penitential  awe.    It  was  said  that  St.  David  had  for  a  time 
dwelt  here  as  a  hermit.     In  the  reign  of  William  Rufus  a 
certain  knight  having  found  his  way  into  the  valley  during 
the  chase,  the  call  fell  upon  him  to  do  the  like ;  the  fame 
of  his  conversion  reached  the  court ;  he  was  joined  by  a 
second  seeker  after  the  holy  life,  then  by  others ;  gifts  and 
wealth  poured  in  upon  them ;  they  were  enrolled  as  a  broth- 
erhood of  the  order  of  St.  Augustine,  and  built  themselves 
a  priory  in  the  midst  of  the  valley,  on  a  level  field  half  a 
furlong  above  the  stream.    Its  ruins  are  still  standing  dark 
and  venerable  amid  the  verdure  of  the  valley,  a  rambling 
assemblage  of  truncated  towers,  disroofed  presbytery,  shat- 
tered aisles,  and  modernized  outbuildings.    The  remains  of 
the  prior's  lodgings,  together  with  that  one  of  the  two 
western  towers  to  which  they  are  contiguous,  are  fitted  up, 
the  ancient  sanctities  all  forgotten,  as  a  bailiflE's  house  and 
inn.     The  avocations  of  dairy,  scullery,  and  larder  are  car- 
ried on  beneath  the  shelter  of  the  other  tower,  while  the 

ibid.,  3rd  series,  vol.  i. ;  also  a  sketch  by  the  present  writer  in  the 
Portfolio,  January,  1881,  from  which  last  two  or  three  sentences  arc 
repeated  in  the  text. 


64  LANDOR.  [ohap. 

wild  rose  and  snapdragon  wave  from  the  crevices  over- 
head, and  the  pigeons  flit  and  nestle  among  the  shaftless 
openings. 

Such  as  Llanthony  Priory  is  now,  such,  making  allow- 
ance for  some  partial  dilapidations  which  neither  he  nor 
his  successors  took  enough  care  to  prevent,  it  in  all  essen- 
tials was  when  Landor  took  it  over  from  its  former  owner 
in  the  spring  of  1809,  and  along  with  it  the  fine  estate  to 
which  it  owes  its  name.  The  property  is  some  eight  miles 
long,  and  includes  for  that  distance  the  whole  sweep  of  the 
vale  of  Ewias.  The  valley  farms  contain  rich  pasturage 
and  fairly  productive  corn-lands,  while  the  eastern  ridge  is 
covered  with  grass,  and  the  western  with  richly  heathered 
moor.  The  moors  yield  tolerable  shooting,  and  the  Hondy 
is  famous  for  its  trout.  But  it  was  not  for  the  sake  of 
shooting  or  fishing  that  Landor  came  to  Llanthony.  He 
was,  indeed,  devoted  to  animals,  but  not  in  the  ordinary 
English  sense  of  being  devoted  to  the  pastime  of  killing 
them.  One  of  the  points  by  which  observers  used  after- 
wards to  be  most  struck  in  Landor  was  the  infinite  affec- 
tion and  mutual  confidence  which  subsisted  between  him 
and  his  pets  of  the  dumb  creation,  both  dogs  and  others, 
with  whom  the  serenity  of  his  relations  used  to  remain 
perfectly  undisturbed  throughout  his  most  explosive  dem- 
onstrations against  the  delinquencies  of  his  own  species. 
But  his  sympathies  for  animals  were  not  confined  to  pets. 
In  early  days  he  had  plied  both  gun  and  rod,  but  by  this 
time  or  soon  afterwards  he  seems  to  have  quite  given  them 
up.  Even  in  youth  he  had  suffered  acute  remorse  on  one 
day  finding  a  partridge,  which  he  had  bagged  over  night 
and  supposed  dead,  still  alive  in  the  morning.  Cruelty  was 
for  him  the  chief — "  if  not  indeed,"  as  he  once  put  it,  "  the 
only" — sin,  and  cruelty  to  animals  was  at  least  a;-  bad  as 


ni.l  LLANTHONY.  66 

cruelty  to  men.  Angling,  in  later  life,  he  once  wrote  of  as 
"  that  sin."  In  a  letter  to  his  sister  he  writes  more  tol- 
erantly, and  with  a  touch  of  his  peculiar  charm,  of  field 
sports  in  general :  "  Let  men  do  these  things  if  they  will. 
Perhaps  there  is  no  harm  in  it;  perhaps  it  makes  them  no 
crueller  than  they  would  be  otherwise.  But  it  is  hard  to 
take  away  what  we  cannot  give,  and  life  is  a  pleasant  thing 
— at  least  to  birds.  No  doubt  the  young  ones  say  tender 
things  to  one  another,  and  even  the  old  ones  do  not  dream 
of  death." 

If  Landor  was  thus  little  of  a  sportsman,  there  was 
another  province  of  a  country  gentleman's  pursuits  into 
which  he  could  enter  with  all  his  heart,  and  that  was  plant- 
ing. He  loved  trees  as  he  loved  flowers,  not  with  any 
scientific  or  practical  knowledge,  but  with  a  poet's  keen- 
ness ot  perception,  heightened  by  a  peculiar  vein  of  reflect- 
ive and  imaginative  association.  He  could  not  bear  either 
the  unnecessary  plucking  of  the  one  or  felling  of  the  other. 
"  Ah,"  he  represents  himself  in  one  of  his  dialogues  as  ex- 
claiming at  the  sight  of  two  fallen  pines  in  Lombardy — 

"...  Ah,  Don  Pepino !  old  trees  in  their  living  state  are  the  only 
things  that  money  cannot  command.  Rivers  leave  their  beds,  run 
into  cities,  and  traverse  mountains  for  it ;  obelisks  and  arches,  palaces 
and  temples,  amphitheatres  and  pyramids,  rise  up  hke  exhalations  at 
its  bidding;  even  the  free  spirit  of  Man,  the  only  thing  great  ca 
earth,  crouches  and  cowers  in  its  presence.  It  passes  away  and  van- 
ishes before  venerable  trees.  What  a  sweet  odour  is  here !  whence 
comes  it  ?  sweeter  it  appears  to  me  and  stronger  than  the  pine  it- 
self." 

The  interlocutor,  Don  Pepino,  explains  that  the  odour 
proceeds  from  a  neighbouring  linden,  and  that  the  lin- 
den, a  very  old  and  large  one,  is  doomed ;  whereupon  Lan- 
dor— 


86  LANDOR.  [chap. 

"  0  Don  Pepino !  the  French,  who  abhor  whatever  is  old  and  what- 
ever is  great,  have  spared  it ;  the  Austrians,  who  sell  their  fortresses 
and  their  armies,  nay,  sometimes  their  daughters,  have  not  sold  it : 
must  it  fall  ?  .  .  . 

"  How  many  fond  and  how  many  lively  thoughts  have  been  nurt- 
ured under  this  tree  !  how  many  kind  hearts  have  beaten  here !  Its 
branches  are  not  so  numerous  as  the  couples  they  have  invited  to  sit 
beside  it,  nor  its  blossoms  and  leaves  as  the  expressions  of  tender- 
ness it  has  witnessed.  What  appeals  to  the  pure  all-seeing  heavens ! 
what  similitudes  to  the  everlasting  mountains !  what  protestations  of 
eternal  truth  and  constancy  from  those  who  now  are  earth ;  they,  and 
their  shrouds,  and  their  coffins !" 

The  passage  in  whicli  Landor  Las  best  expressed  his 
feeling  about  flowers  is  one  of  verse,  and  one  of  the  few 
in  his  writings  which  are  well  known,  though  not  so  well 
as  by  its  unmatched  delicacy  and  grave,  unobtrusive  sweet- 
ness it  deserves : 

"  When  hath  wind  or  ram 

Borne  hard  upon  weak  plants  that  wanted  me, 

And  I  (however  they  might  bluster  round) 

Walkt  off  ?     'Twere  most  ungrateful :  for  sweet  scents 

Are  the  swift  vehicles  of  still  sweeter  thoughts. 

And  nurse  and  pillow  the  dull  memory 

That  would  let  drop  without  them  her  best  stores. 

They  bring  me  tales  of  youth  and  tones  of  love, 

And  'tis  and  ever  was  my  wish  and  way 

To  let  all  flowers  live  freely,  and  all  die 

(Whene'er  their  Genius  bids  their  souls  depart) 

Among  their  kindred  in  their  native  place. 

I  never  pluck  the  rose ;  the  violet's  head 

Hath  shaken  with  my  breath  upon  its  bank 

And  not  reproacht  it ;  the  ever-sacred  cup 

Of  the  pure  lily  hath  between  my  hands 

Felt  safe,  unsoil'd,  nor  lost  one  grain  of  gold." 

"  I  love  these  beautiful  and  peaceful  tribes,"  Landor  says 
elsewhere,  with,  special  reference  to  the  flowers  of  Llan- 


III.]  LLANTHONY.  61 

thony ;  "they  always  meet  one  in  the  same  place  at  the 
same  season  ;  and  years  have  no  more  effect  on  their  placid 
countenances  than  on  so  many  of  the  most  favoured  gods," 
Such  are  the  exquisite  tendernesses  of  feeling  and  imagi- 
nation which  go  together  in  Landor  with  his  masterful  en- 
ergy and  strength. 

With  these  tastes  and  predilections,  then,  and  in  his 
lordly,  imaginative,  sanguinely  unpractical  manner,  Landor 
entered  upon  his  new  career  as  the  beneficent  landowner  of 
a  neglected  and  backward  neighbourhood.  He  would  have 
the  priory  restored,  and  for  that  purpose  portions  of  the 
existing  ruins  were  taken  down,  and  their  stones  carefully 
numbered.  He  would  raise  a  new  mansion  for  himself 
and  his  heirs,  and  he  set  the  builders  to  work  accordingly 
upon  a  site  a  quarter  of  a  mile  above  the  ruins.  Com- 
munications in  the  district  were  by  rough  bridle-paths  and 
fords,  and  Landor  set  gangs  of  men  about  the  construction 
of  roads  and  bridges.  Agriculture  was  miserably  primi- 
tive; he  imported  sheep  from  Segovia,  and  applied  to 
Southey  and  other  friends  for  tenants  who  should  intro. 
duce  and  teach  improved  methods  of  cult'vation.  The 
inhabitants  were  drunken,  impoverished,  and  morose ;  he 
was  bent  upon  reclaiming  and  civilizing  them.  The  woods 
had  suffered  from  neglect  or  malice ;  be  would  clothe  the 
sides  of  the  valley  with  cedars  of  Lebanon.  With  that 
object  he  bought  two  thousand  cones,  calculated  to  yield 
a  hundred  seeds  each,  intending  to  do  ten  times  as  much 
afterwards,  and  exulting  in  the  thought  of  the  two  million 
cedar-trees  which  he  would  thus  leave  for  the  shelter  and 
the  delight  of  posterity. 

While  all  these  great  operations  were  in  progress, 
Landor  was  not  a  permanent  resident,  but  only  a  frequent 
visitor,  on  his  estate,  inhabiting  for  a  few  weeks  at  a  time 


58  LANDOR.  [chap. 

the  rooms  in  the  church  tower,  and  living  in  the  intervals 
principally  at  Bath.  Here,  in  the  early  spring  of  1811, 
he  met  a  young  lady  at  a  ball,  and  as  soon  as  he  had  set 
eyes  on  her  exclaimed,  in  the  true  Landorian  manner,  "  By 
heaven !  that's  the  nicest  girl  in  the  room,  and  I'll  marry 
her."  And  marry  her  he  did ;  the  adventure  quickly  end- 
ing in  that  irreversible  manner,  instead  of,  as  others  a? 
rashly  begun  had  ended,  in  protestations,  misunderstand- 
ings, and  retreat.  Mr.  Forster  appositely  contrasts  Lan- 
der's reckless  action  vyith  his  vi'eighty  and  magnificent 
words  concerning  marriage :  *'  Death  itself  to  the  reflect- 
ing mind  is  less  serious  than  marriage.  The  elder  plant 
is  cut  down  that  the  younger  may  have  room  to  flourish  : 
a  few  tears  drop  into  the  loosened  soil,  and  buds  and  blos- 
soms spring  over  it.  Death  is  not  even  a  blow,  is  not  even 
a  pulsation ;  it  is  a  pause.  But  marriage  unrolls  the  awful 
lot  of  numberless  generations.  Health,  Genius,  Honour, 
are  the  words  inscribed  on  some ;  on  others  are  Disease, 
Fatuity,  and  Infamy."  But  it  was  Landor's  fate  to  be 
thus  wise  only  for  others;  wise  on  paper;  wise  after  the 
event ;  wise,  in  a  word,  in  every  and  any  manner  except 
such  as  could  conduce  to  his  own  welfare.  His  marriage 
was  not  a  happy  one.  His  bride,  Julia  Thuillier,  was  the 
portionless  daughter  of  an  unprosperous  banker  at  Ban- 
bury, said  to  be  descended  from  an  old  Swiss  family. 
Landor,  with  his  moods  of  lofty  absence  and  pre-occupa- 
tion,  and  with  the  tumultuous  and  disconcerting  nature, 
sometimes,  of  his  descents  into  the  region  of  reality,  must 
at  best  have  been  a  trying  companion  to  live  with.  Never- 
theless it  would  seem  as  though  a  woman  capable  of  shar- 
ing his  thoughts,  and  of  managing  him  in  his  fits  of  pas- 
sion, as  his  wiser  friends  weie  accustomed  to  manage  him 
in  later  years,  by  yielding  to  the  storm  at  first,  until  his 


III.]  MARRIAGE.  69 

own  sense  of  humour  would  be  aroused  and  it  would  dis- 
perse itself  in  peals  of  laughter,  might  have  had  an  envia- 
ble, if  not  an  easy,  life  with  one  so  great-minded  and  so 
fundamentally  kind  and  courteous.  Mrs.  Landor  seems  to 
have  had  none  of  the  gifts  of  the  domestic  artist ;  she  was 
not  one  of  those  fine  spirits  who  study  to  create,  out  of 
the  circumstances  and  characters  with  which  they  have  to 
deal,  the  best  attainable  ideal  of  a  home ;  but  a  common- 
place provincial  beauty  enough,  although  lively  and  agree- 
able in  her  way.  "God  forbid,"  in  conversation  once 
growled  Landor,  who  was  habitually  reticent  on  his  private 
troubles,  "  that  I  should  do  otherwise  than  declare  that 
she  always  was  agreeable — to  every  one  but  me."  She 
was  sixteen  years  or  more  younger  than  her  husband ; 
a  fact  of  which,  when  differences  occurred,  she  seems  to 
have  been  not  slow  to  remind  him ;  and  there  is  impartial 
evidence  to  show  that,  in  some  at  least  of  the  disputes 
which  led  to  breaches  more  or  less  permanent  between 
them,  the  immediately  offending  tongue  was  not  the  hus- 
band's but  the  wife's.  He  himself  once  breaks  out,  in 
commenting  on  Milton's  line, 

"  Because  thou  hast  hearken'd  to  the  voice  of  thy  wife," 

"  there  are  very  few  who  have  not  done  this,  bon  gre,  mal 
gre ;  and  many  have  thought  it  curse  enough  of  itself." 
These  matters,  however,  belong  to  a  later  point  of  our  nar- 
rative. At  first  the  little  wife,  with  her  golden  hair,  her 
smiles,  and  her  spirits,  seems  to  have  done  very  well.  She 
accompanied  Landor  on  his  visits  to  Llanthony,  where 
they  received  as  guests,  at  first  in  the  tower  rooms  of  the 
priory,  and  later  in  some  that  had  been  got  habitable  in 
the  new  house,  several  members  of  his  family  and  friends. 

The  Southeys,  to  Landor's  great  delight,  were   his  first 
28 


60  LANDOR.  [chap. 

visitors,  coming  in  the  summer  of  1811,  within  a  few 
months  of  his  marriage.  Later  came  his  sisters,  and  later 
again,  his  mother. 

But  neither  the  care  of  his  estate  nor  his  marriage  had 
the  least  interrupted  the  habitual  occupations  of  Landor's 
mind.  What  he  really  most  valued  in  a  beautiful  country 
was  the  fit  and  inspiring  theatre  which  it  afforded  for  his 
meditations.  Whether  in  town  or  country  he  reflected 
and  composed  habitually  out  walking,  and  therefore  pre- 
ferred at  all  times  to  walk  alone.  "  There  were  half-hours," 
he  represents  himself  as  saying  to  Southey,  "  when,  although 
in  good  humour  and  good  spirits,  we  would  on  no  con- 
sideration be  disturbed  by  the  necessity  of  talking.  In 
this  interval  there  is  neither  storm  nor  sunshine  of  the 
mind,  but  calm  and  (as  the  farmers  call  it)  growing 
weather,  in  which  the  blades  of  thought  spring  up  and 
dilate  insensibly.  Whatever  I  do  I  must  do  in  the  open 
air,  or  in  the  silence  of  night ;  either  is  suflScient ;  but  I 
prefer  the  hours  of  exercise,  or,  what  is  next  to  exercise, 
of  field-repose."  In  these  years  Landor  was  composing 
much.  In  1810  he  printed  a  couple  of  Latin  odes,  ^rf 
Gustavum  Regent,  Ad  Gustavum  exsulem,  and  began  the 
first  of  his  Idyllia  Heroica  in  that  language,  on  the  touch- 
ing story  of  the  priest  Coresus,  his  love  and  sacrifice.  He 
also  grappled  for  the  first  time  with  English  tragedy.  His 
choice  of  subject  was  dictated  by  his  own  and  the  general 
interest  in  and  enthusiasm  for  Spain.  He  fixed  on  that 
romantic  and  semi-mythical  episode  of  early  Spanish  his- 
tory, the  alliance  of  the  heroic  Count  Julian  with  the  in- 
vading Moors,  of  whom  he  had  been  formerly  the  scourge, 
against  his  own  people  and  their  king,  Roderick,  in  order 
to  avenge  the  outrage  which  Roderick  had  done  to  his 
daughter.     The  same  subject  was  in  various  forms  occu-' 


in.]  COUNT  JULIAN.  61 

pying  both  Southey  and  Scott  about  the  same  time ; 
Southey  in  his  epic  of  Roderick,  called  in  the  first  draft 
Pelayo,  and  sent  in  instalments  as  it  was  written  to  Lan- 
der ;  and  Scott  in  his  Vision  of  Don  Roderick.  Landor 
had  begun  his  tragedy,  as  it  happened,  at  the  same  time 
as  Southey  his  epic,  in  the  late  summer  of  1810,  and  he 
finished  it  early  the  next  spring.  His  tragedy  and  his  en- 
gagement are  amusingly  mixed  up  in  a  letter  written  to 
Southey  in  April,  and  ending  "Adieu,  and  congratulate 
me.  I  forgot  to  say  that  I  have  added  thirty-five  verses 
to  Scene  2  of  Act  III." 

Landor's  theory  was  that  the  passions  should  in  poetry, 
and  especially  in  tragedy,  be  represented  "  naked,  like  the 
heroes  and  the  Gods."  In  realizing  the  high  and  des- 
perate passions  of  Roderick  and  Julian,  the  offender  and 
the  avenger,  he  has  girded  himself  for  rivalry  with  what- 
ever is  austere,  haughty,  pregnant,  and  concise  in  the  works 
of  the  masters  whom  he  most  admired  for  those  qualities. 
But  in  raising  his  characters  up  to  this  ideal  height,  in 
seeking  to  delineate  their  passions  in  forms  of  this  heroic 
energy  and  condensation,  this  "  nakedness,"  to  use  his  own 
word,  Landor  has  not,  I  think,  succeeded  in  keeping  them 
human.  Human  to  himself,  during  the  process  of  their 
creation,  they  unquestionably  were ;  "  I  brought  before 
me,"  he  writes,  "  the  various  characters,  the  very  tones  of 
their  voices,  their  forms,  complexions,  and  step.  In  the 
daytime  I  laboured,  and  at  night  unburdened  my  mind, 
shedding  many  tears."  Nevertheless  they  do  not  live  in 
like  manner  for  the  reader.  The  conception  of  Count 
Julian,  desperately  loving  both  his  dishonoured  daughter 
and  the  country  against  which  he  has  turned  in  order  to 
chastise  her  dishonourer ;  inexorably  bent  on  a  vengeance 
the  infliction  of  which  costs  him  all  the  while  the  direst 


62  •  LANDOR.  [chap. 

agony  and  remorse;  is  certainly  grandiose  and  terrible 
enougb.  But  even  tbis  conception  does  not  seem  to  be 
realized,  except  at  moments,  in  a  manner  to  justify  tbe 
enthusiastic  praise  bestowed  upon  it  by  De  Quincey,  in 
bis  erratic,  fragmentary,  and  otherwise  grudging  notes  on 
Landor.  Still  less  are  we  livingly  impressed  by  tbe  van- 
quished, remorseful,  still  defiant  and  intriguing  Roderick, 
the  injured  and  distracted  Egilona,  the  dutiful  and  out- 
raged Covilla,  her  lover  Sisabert,  or  tbe  vindictive  and  sus- 
picious Moorish  leader  Muza,  These  and  the  other  char- 
acters are  made  to  declare  themselves  by  means  of  utter- 
ances often  admirably  energetic,  and  of  images  sometimes 
magnificently  daring  ;  yet  they  fail  to  convince  or  carry  us 
away.  This  effect  is  partly  due,  no  doubt,  to  defect  of 
dramatic  construction.  The  scenes  of  the  play  succeed 
each  other  by  no  process  of  organic  sequence  or  evolution 
— a  fact  admitted  by  Landor  himself  when  he  afterwards 
called  it  a  series  of  dialogues  rather  than  a  drama.  Some 
of  them  are  themselves  dramatically  sterile,  tedious,  and 
confusing.  Others,  and  isolated  lines  and  sayings  in  al- 
most all,  are  written,  if  not  with  convincing  felicity,  at  any 
rate  with  overmastering  force.  On  the  whole,  we  shall  be 
more  inclined  to  agree  with  Lamb's  impression  of  Count 
Julian  than  with  De  Quincey 's.  "  I  nmst  read  again  Lan- 
der's Julian,''''  writes  Lamb,  in  ,1815.  "I  have  not  read 
it  for  some  time.  I  think  he  must  have  failed  in  Roder- 
ick, for  I  remember  nothing  of  him,  nor  of  any  distinct 
character  as  a  character  —  only  fine  sounding  passages." 
The  reader  may  perhaps  judge  of  the  quality  of  the 
work  by  the  following  fragment,  exhibiting  at  its  high- 
est point  of  tension  the  struggle  between  the  enemies 
Roderick  and  Julian  after  Roderick  has  fallen  into  Julian's 
power : 


III.]  COUNT  JULIAN.  t3 

'•^'Julian.  Could  I  speak  patiently  who  speak  to  the^ 
I  would  say  more  .  .  .  part  of  thy  punishment 
It  should  be,  to  be  taught. 

Roderigo.  Reserve  thy  wisdom 

Until  thy  patience  come,  its  best  ally. 
I  learn  no  lore,  of  peace  or  war,  from  thee. 

Julian.  No,  thou  shalt  study  soon  another  tongue, 
And  suns  more  ardent  shall  mature  thy  mind. 
Either  the  cross  thou  bearest,  and  thy  knees. 
Among  the  silent  caves  of  Palestine 
Wear  the  sharp  flints  away  with  midnight  prayer  j 
Or  thou  shalt  keep  the  fasts  of  Barbary, 
Shalt  wait  amid  the  crowds  that  throng  the  well 
From  sultry  noon  till  the  skies  fade  again. 
To  draw  up  water  and  to  bring  it  home 
In  the  crackt  gourd  of  some  vile  testy  knave. 
Who  spurns  thee  back  with  bastinadoed  foot 
For  ignorance  or  delay  of  his  command, 

Roderigo.  Rather  the  poison  or  the  bowstring, 

Julian.  Slaves 

To  others'  passions  die  such  deaths  as  those :   ^ 
Slaves  to  their  own  should  die — 

Roderigo.  What  worse  ? 

Julian.  Their  own. 

Roderigo.  Is  this  thy  counsel,  renegade  ? 

Julian.  Not  miae; 

I  point  a  better  path,  nay,  force  thee  on. 
I  shelter  thee  from  every  brave  man's  sword 
While  I  am  near  thee :  I  bestow  on  thee 
Life  :  if  thou  die,  'tis  when  thou  sojournest 
Protected  by  this  arm  and  voice  no  more; 
'Tis  slavishly,  'tis  ignominiously, 
'Tis  by  a  villain's  knife. 

Roderigo.  By  whose  ? 

Julian.  Roderigo 's." 

Landor's  severe  method  does  not  admit  mucL  scenic  or 
accessory  ornameut  in  a  work  of  this  kind,  but  he  has 


64  LANDOR.  [chap. 

made  a  vivid  and  pleasant  nse  of  his  own  recent  Spanisl 
experiences  in  the  passage  where  Julian  speaks  to  his 
daughter  of  the  retreats  where  she  may  hide  her  shame : 

"  Wide  are  the  regions  of  our  far-famed  land  ; 
Thou  shalt  arrive  at  her  remotest  bounds, 
See  her  best  people,  choose  some  holiest  house ; 
Whether  where  Castro  from  surrounding  vines 
Hears  the  hoarse  ocean  roar  among  his  caves, 
And  through  the  fissure  in  the  green  churchyard 
The  wind  wail  loud  the  calmest  summer  day  ; 
Or  where  Santona  leans  against  the  hill. 
Hidden  from  sea  and  land  by  groves  and  bowers." 

And  again — 

"  If  strength  be  wanted  for  security, 
Mountains  the  guard,  forbidding  all  approach 
With  iron-pointed  and  uplifted  gates, 
Tliou  wilt  be  welcome  too  in  Aguilar, 
Impenetrable,  marble-turreted. 
Surveying  from  aloft  the  limpid  ford, 
The  massive  fane,  the  sylvan  avenue ; 
Whose  hospitality  I  proved  myself, 
A  willing  leader  in  no  impious  war 
When  fame  and  freedom  urged  me ;  or  mayst  dwell 
In  Reynosas'  dry  and  thriftless  dale, 
Unharvested  beneath  October  moons, 
Among  those  frank  and  cordial  villagers." 

For  the  rest,  Count  Julian  is  not  poor  in  solid  and  pro- 
found reflexions  upon  life,  carved,  polished,  and  compress- 
ed in  the  manner  which  was  Landor's  alone,  as  thus ; 

"  Wretched  is  he  a  woman  hath  forgiven ; 
With  her  forgiveness  ne'er  hath  love  return'd  ;'* 

or  thus — 

"  Of  all  who  pass  us  in  life's  drear  descent 
We  grieve  the  most  for  those  who  wisht  to  die." 


III.]  COUNT  JULIAN.  65 

During  the  composition  of  Count  Julian  Landor  had 
been  in  close  correspondence  with  Southey,  and  had  sub- 
mitted to  him  the  manuscript  as  it  progressed.  He  had 
at  one  moment  entertained  the  obviously  impracticable 
idea  of  getting  his  tragedy  put  on  the  stage  by  Kemble. 
This  abandoned,  he  offered  it  to  Longmans  for  publication. 
They  declined  to  print  it  either  at  their  own  costs,  or  even, 
when  he  proposed  that  method,  at  the  author's.  Where- 
upon Landor  writes  to  Southey :  "  We  have  lately  had 
cold  weather  here,  and  fires.  On  receiving  the  last  letter 
of  Mr.  Longman  I  committed  to  the  flames  my  tragedy  of 
Ferranti  and  Gmlio,  with  which  I  intended  to  surprise 
you,  and  am  resolved  that  never  verse  of  mine  shall  be 
hereafter  committed  to  anything  else.  My  literary  career 
has  been  a  very  curious  one.  You  cannot  imagine  how  I 
feel  relieved  at  laying  down  its  burden,  and  abandoning 
its  tissue  of  humiliations.  I  fancied  I  had  at  last  ac- 
quired the  right  tone  of  tragedy,  and  was  treading  down 
at  heel  the  shoes  of  Alfieri."  The  resolution  recorded 
with  this  composed  and  irrevocable  air  lasted  no  longer 
than  the  choler  which  had  provoked  it;  and  though  the 
play  of  Ferranti  and  Giulio,  all  but  a  few  fragments,  had 
been  irretrievably  sacrificed,  we  find  Count  Julian  within 
a  few  months  offered  to  and  accepted  by  Mr.  Murray,  on 
the  introduction  of  Southey,  and  actually  published  at  the 
beginning  of  1812.  "■ 

The  same  house  brought  out  in  the  same  year  another 
production  of  Landor's  of  a  totally  different  character, 
namely,  a  Commentary  on  Memoirs  of  Mr.  Fox.  In  the 
biography  of  Landor  this  volume  is  of  peculiar  interest. 
It  contains  his  views  on  men,  books,  and  governments, 
set  forth  in  the  manner  that  was  most  natural  to  him,  that 
is  miscellaneously  and  without  sequence,  in  a  prose  which 
4 


66  LANDOR.  [chap, 

has  none  of  the  inequalities  nor  opacities  of  his  verse, 
but  is  at  once  condensed  and  lucid,  weighty  without  em- 
phasis, and  stately  without  effort  or  inflation.  The  ful- 
ness of  Landor's  mind,  the  clearness  and  confidence  of  his 
decisions,  the  mixed  dogmatism  and  urbanity  of  his  man- 
ner, are  nowhere  more  characteristically  displayed.  The 
text  for  his  deliverances  is  furnished  by  Trotter's  Memoirs 
of  Fox,  then  lately  published.  His  motives  in  writing  are 
declared  in  the  following  words :  "  I  would  represent  his 
(Fox's)  actions  to  his  contemporaries  as  I  believe  they 
will  appear  to  posterity.  I  would  destroy  the  impression 
of  the  book  before  me,  because  I  am  firmly  persuaded 
that  its  tendency  would  be  pernicious.  The  author  is  an 
amiable  man,  so  was  the  subject  of  his  memoir.  But  of 
all  the  statesmen  who  have  been  conversant  in  the  man- 
agement of  our  affairs,  during  a  reign  the  most  disastrous 
in  our  annals,  the  example  of  Mr.  Fox,  if  followed  up, 
would  be  the  most  fatal  to  our  interests  and  glory."  Else- 
where he  speats  of  the  sacrifices  made  during  the  prepara- 
tion of  the  book  to  appease  the  scruples  of  its  publisher. 
We  know  from  his  letters  that  one  of  his  schemes  in  those 
days  was  to  render  himself  and  other  lovers  of  free  speech 
independent  of  the  publishers,  by  establishing  a  printing- 
press  of  his  own  at  Llanthony,  "  at  a  cost  of  5000/.,"  and 
"  for  the  purpose,  at  much  private  loss,  disquiet,  and  danger, 
of  setting  the  public  mind  more  erect,  and  throwing  the 
two  factions  into  the  dust."  The  Commentary  as  actually 
printed  contains,  first,  a  dedicatory  address  to  the  Presi- 
dent of  the  United  States,  deprecating  the  war  then  im- 
minent, in  consequence  of  the  fiscal  policy  of  Canning,  be- 
tween them  and  the  mother  country.  In  the  course  of 
this  dedication  we  find  Landor  putting  forward  for  the 
first  time  one  of  the  fundamental  articles  of  his  creed,  in 


iii.J  COMMENTARY  ON  MEMOIRS  OF  FOX.  &1 

the    shape   of   the   following    classification    of   animated 

beings : 

"  Consider,  sir,  what  are  the  two  nations,  if  I  must  call  them  two, 
which  are  about,  not  to  terminate,  but  to  extend  their  animosities  by 
acts  of  violence  and  slaughter.  If  you  think  as  I  do,  and  free  men, 
allowing  for  the  degree  of  their  capacities,  generally  think  alike,  you 
will  divide  the  creatures  of  the  Almighty  into  three  parts :  first,  mea 
who  enjoy  the  highest  perfection  of  liberty  and  civilization ;  second- 
ly, men  who  live  under  the  despotism  of  one  person  or  more,  and  are 
not  permitted  to  enjoy  their  reason  for  the  promotion  of  their  hap- 
piness ;  and  thirdly,  the  brute  creation,  which  is  subject  also  to  ar- 
bitrary will,  and  whose  happiness  their  slender  powers  of  reasoning 
(for  some  they  have)  is  inadequate  to  promote.  These  three  classes, 
iu  my  view  of  the  subject,  stand  at  equal  distances." 

After  the  dedication  follows  a  preface  full  of  measured 
invective  against  those  responsible  for  the  political  and 
military  affairs  of  England,  varied  by  observations  on  the 
character  of  the  French  and  of  their  ruler,  for  the  character 
of  which  see  above  (p.  34),  and  by  the  following  fine  ora- 
torical outburst,  a  little  less  accurately  wrought  and  bal- 
anced than  it  would  have  been  in  Landor's  later  prose,  in 
which  the  stringency  of  the  penal  laws  against  the  poor  is 
contrasted  with  the  lenient  treatment  of  a  State  delinquent 
like  Lord  Melville,  long  Lord  Privy  Seal  for  Scotland  and 
President  of  the  Board  of  Control  for  India : 

"  If  an  unfortunate  mother  at  a  distance  from  home,  carrying  with 
her  a  half -starved  infant,  along  roads  covered  with  snow,  should 
snatch  a  shirt  from  a  hedge  to  protect  it  from  a  miserable  death, 
she  is  condemned  to  die.  That  she  never  could  have  known  the 
law,  that  she  never  could  have  assented  to  its  equity,  avails  her 
nothing ;  that  she  was  pierced  by  the  cries  of  her  own  offspring ; 
that  it  was  not  merely  the  instigation  of  want,  but  the  force  of  om- 
nipotent nature,  the  very  voice  of  God  himself,  the  preservation  of  a 
human  being,  of  her  own,  the  cause  of  her  wanderings  and  her  wretch- 
edness, of  her  captivity  and  her  chains :  what  are  these  in  opposition 


68  LANDOR.  [chap. 

to  an  act  of  parliament  ?  she  dies.  Look  on  the  other  side.  A  no- 
bleman of  most  acute  judgment,  well  versed  in  all  the  usages  of  his 
country,  rich,  powerful,  commanding,  with  a  sway  more  absolute  and 
unresisted  than  any  of  its  ancient  monarchs,  the  whole  kingdom  in 
which  he  was  a  subject,  with  all  its  boroughs,  and  its  shires  and  its 
courts  and  its  universities,  and  in  addition,  as  merely  a  fief,  the  empire 
of  all  India ;  who  possessed  more  lucrative  patronage  than  all  the 
crowned  heads  in  Europe ;  let  this  illustrious  character,  to  whom  so 
many  men  of  rank  looked  up  as  their  protector,  and  whom  senators 
and  statesmen  acknowledged  as  their  guide  ;  let  this  distinguished 
member  of  the  British  parliament  break  suddenly  through  the  law 
which  he  himself  had  brought  into  the  House  for  the  conservation 
of  our  property,  without  necessity,  without  urgency,  without  tempta- 
tion— and  behold  the  consequence." 

The  consequence  is  somewhat  flat;  and  omitting  Lan- 
der's account  of  Melville's  acquittal  and  careless  bearing 
we  may  remember  that  the  most  weighty  and  pointed  of 
all  his  epigrams  in  verse  is  that  which  he  directed  against 
the  same  delinquent : 

"  God's  laws  declare 

Thou  shalt  not  swear 
By  aught  in  heaven  above  or  earth  below. 

'  Upon  my  honour !'  Melville  cries. 

He  swears,  and  lies. 
Does  Melville  then  break  God's  commandment  ?     No." 

Landor's  preface  further  contains  reflections  on  the  utility 
and  the  lessons  of  history  for  statesmen,  and  on  their  neg- 
lect by  Pitt  and  Fox ;  and  ends  with  the  expression  of  a 
wish  for  the  continuance  of  the  present  ministry  in  oflSce, 
and  an  urgent  plea  in  favour  of  Catholic  emancipation. 
In  the  body  of  his  book  he  takes  extracts  from  Trotter's 
Memoirs  as  they  come,  and  appends  to  each  his  own  re- 
flexions.    Literature  and  politics,  personal  topics  and  gen- 


in.]  COMMENTARY  ON  MEMOIRS  OF  FOX.  69 

eral,  succeed  each  other  promiscuously.  Here  is  what  Lan- 
dor  has  to  say  of  Burke  and  his  policy  during  the  French 
revolution  :  "  Burke,  the  only  member  of  Parliament  whose 
views  were  extensive,  and  whose  reading  was  all  turned  to 
practical  account,  was  more  violent  than  even  Lord  Gren- 
ville  for  a  declaration  of  hostilities.  His  unrivalled  elo- 
quence was  fatal  to  our  glory  ;  it  silenced  our  renown  for 
justice  and  for  wisdom,  undermined  our  internal  prosperi- 
ty, and  invaded  our  domestic  peace."  Then  follows  a  long 
disparaging  criticism  of  Spenser,  whose  poetry  always 
seemed  to  Landor  fantastic,  unreal,  and  somewhat  weari- 
some ;  then  a  comparative  note  on  Chaucer  and  Burns ; 
and  then,  after  discursive  criticisms  on  the  creations  of 
Caliban  and  Cyclops,  on  Addison,  and  on  the  Spenserian 
stanza,  comes  a  conclusion  of  Ciceronian  gravity  and  grace. 
"  It  is  better  to  leave  off  where  reflexion  may  rest  than 
where  passion  may  be  excited ;  and  it  is  soothing  to  take 
the  last  view  of  politics  from  among  the  works  of  the 
imagination.  ,  .  .  An  escape  in  this  manner  from  the  mazes 
of  politics  and  the  discord  of  party,  leaves  such  sensations 
on  the  heart  as  are  experienced  by  the  disinterested  and 
sober  man,  after  some  public  meeting,  when  he  has  quit- 
ted the  crowded  and  noisy  room,  the  crooked  and  narrow 
streets,  the  hisses  and  huzzas  of  the  rabble,  poor  and  rich, 
and  enters  his  own  grounds  again,  and  meets  his  own  fam- 
ily at  the  gate."  Immediately  after  which  Landor  turns 
round  again  to  the  charge  in  a  final,  denunciatory  post- 
script. This  remarkable  outpouring  of  an  authoritative, 
versatile,  and  richly  stored  mind  was  destined  to  have  no 
influence  and  few  readers.  Like  the  Simonidea,  though 
in  deference  to  a  different  order  of  susceptibilities,  it  seems 
to  have  been  recalled  almost  as  soon  as  it  was  published, 
and  the  only  copy  known  to  exist  is  one  formerly  in  the 


YO  LANDOR.  [chap. 

possession  of  Southey,  and  now  in  tliat  of  Lord  Hough- 
ton. 

Besides  his  two  tragedies,  Count  Julian  and  the  lost 
Ferranti  and  Giulio,  Landor  wrote  during  the  latter  part 
of  this  Llanthony  period  a  comedy  called  the  Charitable 
Dowager,  the  proceeds  of  which  he  destined  for  the  relief 
of  an  old  acquaintance  in  Spain,  for  whose  hospitality  he 
had  good  reason  to  be  grateful  when  he  found  himself  pre- 
vented from  entering  Bilbao.  The  piece  was,  however, 
neither  produced  nor  even  printed,  and  considering  the 
quality  of  Landor's  later  efforts  in  the  comic  vein,  its  loss 
is  probably  not  to  be  regretted.  Landor  had  in  these  days 
been  also  at  work  at  what  he  in  his  heart  cared  for  most 
of  all,  his  Idyllia  and  other  poems  in  Latin  ;  which  Valpy, 
he  writes,  "the  greatest  of  all  coxcombs,"  very  much  wished 
to  publish,  but  which  he  preferred  to  print  on  his  own  ac- 
count at  Oxford,  the  proceeds,  if  any,  to  be  distributed 
among  the  distressed  poor  of  Leipzig. 

This  was  towards  the  close  of  1813.  In  the  meantime 
Landor's  magnificent  projects  as  a  landlord  had  been  crum- 
bling under  his  hands.  Less  than  four  years  had  brought 
his  affairs  to  such  a  pass  as  utterly  to  disgust  him  with 
Llanthony,  Wales,  and  the  Welsh.  There  was  scafcely  one 
of  his  undertakings  but  had  proved  abortive.  There  was 
scarcely  a  public  authority  of  his  district  against  whom 
he  had  not  a  grievance,  or  a  neighbour,  high  or  low,  with 
whom  he  had  not  come  into  collision,  or  a  tenant  or  la- 
bourer on  his  estate  who  had  not  turned  against  him.  The 
origin  of  these  troubles  sprang  almost  always  either  from 
Landor's  headlong  generosity,  or  else  from  his  impractica- 
ble punctiliousness.  He  had  a  genius  for  the  injudicious 
virtues,  and  those  which  recoil  against  their  possessor.  Of 
his  besetting  faults,  pride  and  anger,  pride  constantly  as- 


m.]  LLANTHONY.  11 

sured  him  that  he  was  not  as  other  men,  anger  as  constant- 
ly resented  the  behaviour  of  other  men  when  it  fell  below 
the  standard  of  his  own.  He  would  insist  on  expecting 
ancient  Roman  principles  in  all  with  whom  he  came  in  con- 
tact, and  when  he  was  undeceived  would  flame  into  Rhada- 
manthine  rage  against  the  culprit,  idealising  peccadilloes 
into  enormities,  and  denouncing  and  seeking  to  have  them 
chastised  accordingly.  Thus  he  made  bad  worse,  and  by 
his  lofty,  impetuous,  unwise  ways,  turned  the  whole  coun- 
try-side into  a  hostile  camp.  It  is  true  that  luck  and  the 
characters  of  those  with  whom  he  had  to  deal  were  much 
against  him.  His  first  disenchantments  arose  in  the  course 
of  communications  with  men  in  authority.  He  wrote  to 
the  bishop  of  his  diocese,  asking  permission  to  restore  for 
service  a  part  of  Llanthony  priory.  His  first  letter  received 
no  answer.  He  repeated  his  request  in  a  second,  in  the 
course  of  which  he  remarked,  "  God  alone  is  great  enough 
for  me  to  ask  anything  of  twice ;"  to  which  there  came  an 
answer  coldly  sanctioning  his  proposal,  but  saying  that  an 
act  of  parliament  would  be  required  before  it  could  be 
carried  out ;  whereupon  Landor,  who  had  lately  had  enough 
of  acts  of  parliament,  allowed  the  matter  to  drop.  At  the 
Monmouthshire  assizes  in  1812  he  was  on  the  grand  jury. 
The  members  of  that  body  having  been  in  the  usual  for- 
mal terms  adjured  by  the  judge  to  lay  before  him  whatever 
evidences  they  possessed  of  felony  committed  in  the  coun- 
ty, what  must  our  noble  Roman  do  but  take  the  adjuration 
literally,  and  in  defiance  of  all  usage  deliver  with  his  own 
hand  to  the  judge  a  written  accusation  of  felony  against 
an  influential  rascal  of  the  neighbourhood,  an  attorney  and 
surveyor  of  taxes ;  coupled  with  a  complaint  against  his 
brother  jurors  for  neglect  of  duty  in  refusing  to  inquire 
into  the  case.    The  judge  took  no  notice  of  the  communi- 


•72  LANDOR.  [chap. 

cation,  and  Landor,  having  naturally  gained  nothing  by  his 
action  except  the  resentful  or  contemptuous  shrugs  of  his 
fellow-jurors,  closed  the  incident  with  a  second  letter  of 
polite  sarcasm,  in  which  he  wrote,  "I  acknowledge  my 
error,  and  must  atone  for  my  presumption.  But  I  really 
thought  your  lordship  was  in  earnest,  seeing  you,  as  I  did, 
in  the  robes  of  justice,  and  hearing  you  speak  in  the  name 
and  with  the  authority  of  the  laws."  About  the  same 
time,  partly  on  the  suggestion  of  the  one  or  two  gentle- 
men of  the  neighbourhood  who  had  culture  and  character 
enough  to  be  his  friends,  Landor  applied  to  the  Duke  of 
Beaufort,  the  lord  lieutenant,  to  be  put  on  the  commission 
of  the  peace  of  the  county.  There  was  no  resident  magis- 
trate within  ten  miles  of  Llanthony,  and  yet  his  applica- 
tion was  refused.  Partly  his  politics,  partly  the  fact  that 
a  brother  of  the  Duke's  had  been  foreman  of  the  grand 
jury  at  the  recent  assize,  explain  the  refusal.  Landor  there- 
upon wrote  a  temperate  letter  to  the  Lord  Chancellor  (El- 
don),  pointing  out  the  necessity  of  a  magistrate  being  ap- 
pointed for  his  neighbourhood ;  and  when  he  received  no 
answer,  followed  it  up  by  another,  haughtier,  but  not  less 
calm  and  measured,  in  which  he  describes  his  qualifications 
and  his  pursuits,  and  contrasts  them  in  a  strain  of  grave 
irony  with  those  usually  thought  suflScient  for  a  public 
servant :  "  I  never  now  will  accept,  my  lord,  anything  what- 
ever that  can  be  given  by  ministers  or  by  chancellors,  not 
even  the  dignity  of  a  county  justice,  the  only  honour  or 
office  I  ever  have  solicited." 

Landor's  worst  troubles  at  Llanthony  did  not,  however, 
proceed  from  men  in  high  station,  but  from  his  own  ten- 
ants and  labourers.  He  found  the  Welsh  peasantry  churl- 
ish, malicious,  and  unimprovable.  "  If  drunkenness,  idle- 
ness, mischief,  and  revenge  are  the  principal  characteristics 


m.]  LLANTHONY,  73 

of  the  savage  state,  what  nation — I  will  not  say  in  Europe, 
but  in  the  world — is  so  singularly  tattooed  with  them  as 
the  Welsh  ?"  And  again,  "  The  earth  contains  no  race  of 
human  beings  so  totally  vile  and  worthless  as  the  Welsh." 
The  French  themselves  seemed  no  longer  odious  in  com- 
parison. Their  government  Landor  had  come  to  regard 
as  at  any  rate  more  efficient  and  better  administered  than 
ours ;  and  after  three  years'  experience  of  the  ingratitude, 
thriftlessness,  and  lawlessness  of  the  people  round  about 
him,  we  find  him  already  half  determined  to  go  and  make 
his  home  in  France.  But  things  would  probably  never 
have  really  come  to  that  pass  had  it  not  been  for  the  mal- 
practices of  an  English  tenant,  to  whom  Landor  had  look- 
ed most  of  all  for  the  improvement  of  his  property.  This 
was  one  Betham,  whose  family  was  known,  and  one  of 
his  sisters  highly  esteemed,  by  both  Lamb  and  Southey. 
Betham  had  used  Southey's  name  to  introduce  himself  to 
Landor  as  a  tenant,  and  had  been  accepted,  he  and  his 
family,  with  open  arms  in  consequence.  Landor  rented 
him  first  one  and  then  another  of  his  best  farms  on  terms 
of  reckless  liberality,  although  he  knew  nothing  of  agri- 
culture, and  his  previous  career  had  been  that,  first,  of  an 
usher  in  a  school,  and  then  of  a  petty  officer  on  board  an 
East  India  Company's  ship.  He  is  the  same  whom  Lamb 
had  in  his  mind  when,  years  afterwards,  he  wrote  to  Lan- 
dor, "  I  knew  all  your  Welsh  annoyancers,  the  measureless 
B.'s.  I  knew  a  quarter  of  a  mile  of  them.  Seventeen 
brothers  and  sixteen  sisters,  as  they  appear  to  me  in  mem- 
ory. There  was  one  of  them  that  used  to  fix  his  long  legs 
on  my  fender  and  tell  a  story  of  a  shark  every  night,  end- 
less, immortal.  How  have  I  grudged  the  salt-sea  ravener 
not  having  had  his  gorge  of  him."  This  unconscionable 
tenant  not  only  did  nothing  for  the  land,  but  misconducted 
F     4* 


H  LANDOR.  [chap. 

himself  scandalously,  holding  open  house  for  his  brothers 
and  his  sisters,  his  father  and  his  father's  friends,  associat- 
ing in  the  ale-houses  with  the  scum  of  the  neighbourhood, 
neglecting,  and  by-and-by  refusing,  to  pay  his  rent,  and 
when  at  last  Lander  lost  patience,  leaguing  himself  with 
other  defaulting  tenants,  and  with  every  malicious  attorney 
and  every  thievish  idler  in  the  country-side,  to  make  his 
landlord's  existence  intolerable.  Landor's  rents  were  with- 
held, his  game  poached,  his  plantations  damaged,  his 
timber  stolen,  his  character  maligned,  and  even  his  life 
threatened.  He  was  like  a  lion  baited  by  curs.  He  was 
plunged  up  to  the  neck  in  lawsuits.  In  the  actions  and 
counter-actions  that  were  coming  up  for  trial  continually 
between  himself  and  his  tenants  and  neighbours,  the  local 
courts  and  juries  were  generally  adverse  to  him,  the  local 
attorneys  insolent.  One  of  these,  on  some  unusual  provo- 
cation, Landor  beat.  "  I  treated  him  as  he  deserved.  He 
brought  a  criminal  action  against  me."  In  the  case  of  a 
London  counsel  employed  against  him,  Mr.  (afterwards 
Judge)  Taunton,  Landor  adopted  a  more  innocuous,  if  to 
himself  at  least  as  gratifying,  mode  of  revenge.  "  I  would 
not  encounter  the  rudeness  I  experienced  from  this  Taun- 
ton to  save  all  the  property  I  possess.  I  have,  however, 
chastised  him  in  my  Latin  verses  now  in  the  press."  With 
reference  to  the  criminal  action  pending  on  the  part  of  the 
other  and  physically  smarting  man  of  law,  he  writes, "  I 
shall  be  cited  to  take  my  trial  at  Monmouth;  and  as  I 
certainly  shall  not  appear,  I  shall  be  outlawed."  In  the 
meantime,  his  principal  suit,  for  the  recovery  of  nearly 
two  thousand  pounds  due  from  Betham,  had  been  success- 
ful, and  his  claim  had  been  allowed  by  the  Court  of  Ex- 
chequer to  the  last  farthing.  But  it  was  too  late.  Ruin 
stared  him  in  the  face.     He  had  sunk  over  seventy  thou- 


III.]  LLANTHONY.  75 

sand  pounds  upon  the  Llauthony  property  in  five  years, 
and  be  had  no  ready  money  to  meet  the  interest  due  on 
a  mortgage.  There  were  other  equally  urgent  claims.  The 
pressure  of  these,  together  with  the  probable  results  of  his 
resolution  not  to  appear  to  answer  the  charge  against  him 
at  Monmouth,  determined  him,  in  May,  1814,  to  retreat 
to  the  Continent.  His  personal  property,  both  in  Wales 
and  at  Bath,  was  sold.  The  estate  of  Llanthony  was  taken 
by  arrangement  out  of  his  hands,  and  vested  in  those  of 
trustees.  The  life-charge  in  favour  of  his  mother  entitled 
her,  fortunately,  to  the  position  of  first  creditor.  She  had 
an  excellent  talent  for  business,  as  had  one  at  least  of  her 
younger  sons,  and  Llanthony,  under  the  management  of 
its  new  trustees,  soon  proved  able  to  yield  a  handsome 
enough  provision  for  Landor's  maintenance  after  all  charges 
upon  it  had  been  satisfied.  His  half-built  mansion  was 
pulled  down,  and  its  remains  only  exist  to-day  in  the  guise 
of  a  hay -shed;  while  in  the  adjoining  dingle  the  stream 
is  all  but  dried  up,  and  silent,  as  if  its  Naiad  had  fled  with 
her  master,  while  all  the  rest  are  vocal.  The  property  still 
belongs  to  Landor's  surviving  son.  His  roads,  and  a  good 
part  of  his  plantations,  still  exist  to  bear  witness  to  the 
energy  of  his  years  of  occupation,  and  the  beautiful  Welsh 
valley  will  be  for  ever  associated  with  his  fame. 

Landor  sent  to  Southey  from  Weymouth  on  the  2'7th 
of  May,  1814,  a  letter  dejected  and  almost  desperate,  al- 
though written  with  his  unfailing  dignity  of  manner,  in 
which  he  speaks  of  his  future  as  follows :  "  I  go  to-morrow 
to  St.  Malo.  In  what  part  of  France  I  shall  end  my  days 
I  know  not ;  but  there  I  shall  end  them,  and  God  grant 
that  I  may  end  them  speedily,  and  so  as  to  leave  as  little 
sorrow  as  possible  to  my  friends.  .  .  .  My  wife  follows 

when  I  have  found  a  place  fit  for  her  reception.     Adieu." 
29 


Y6  LANDOR.  [chap,  iil 

But  the  cup  of  Lander's  bitterness  was  not  yet  full.  He 
sailed,  in  fact,  not  to  St.  Malo,  but  to  Jersey,  and  was 
there  joined  by  his  wife  and  her  young  sister.  Mrs.  Lan- 
dor  disliked  the  plan  of  going  to  live  in  France,  while 
Landor,  on  his  part,  was  absolutely  bent  upon  it.  He 
desired  that  the  question  of  changing  their  destination 
might  not  again  be  raised.  She  would  not  suffer  the 
question  to  drop.  Arguing  one  evening  with  more  than 
usual  petulance,  she  taunted  him  before  her  sister  with 
their  disparity  of  years.  His  pride  took  sudden  fire ;  he 
rose  at  four  the  next  morning,  crossed  the  island  on  foot, 
and  before  noon  was  under  weigh  for  the  coast  of  France, 
in  an  oyster-boat,  alone. 


CHAPTER  IV. 

LIFE    AT    TOURS COMO PISA IDYLLIA    HEUOICA. 

[1814—1821.] 

Up  to  tlie  date  which  we  have  now  reached  Lander's  ca- 
reer seems  to  present  a  spectacle  of  almost  as  much  futil- 
ity as  force.  His  resplendent  gifts  and  lofty  purposes 
had  been  attended  with  little  solid  result,  either  in  the 
practical  or  in  the  intellectual  sphere.  In  the  practical 
part  of  life  he  had,  indeed,  thus  far  conspicuously  failed. 
The  existence  which  he  had  realized  for  himself  was  one 
in  which  almost  all  his  ideals  were  reversed.  Bent  upon 
walking  in  the  paths  of  serenity,  he  had  nevertheless  trod- 
den those  of  contention.  Proudly  exacting  in  his  stand- 
ard of  intercourse  and  behaviour,  he  had  been  involved  in 
ignominious  wranglings  with  the  base.  Born  to  wealth, 
and  eager  to  employ  it  for  the  public  good,  he  had  reap- 
ed nothing  but  frustration  and  embarrassment.  Tenderly 
chivalrous  towards  women,  he  had  just  turned  his  back  in 
anger  upon  his  young  wife.  Neither  in  the  other  sphere 
of  man's  activity — the  intellectual  and  imaginative  sphere 
— which  to  him  was,  in  truth,  the  more  real  and  engrossing 
of  the  two,  had  Landor  as  yet  done  himself  anything  like 
full  justice.  Posterity,  if  his  career  had  ended  here,  would 
probably  have  ignored  his  writings,  or  have  remembered 
them  at  most  as  the  fragmentary  and  imperfect  products 


78  LANDOR.  [chap. 

of  a  powerful  spirit  that  had  passed  away  without  having 
left  any  adequate  memorial.  Several  years  had  still  to 
elapse  before  Landor  addressed  himself  to  that  which  was 
destined  to  be  his  great  and  vital  task  in  literature,  the 
writing  of  the  Imaginary  Conversations.  His  life  until 
then  continued  to  be  unsettled,  and  his  eflEorts  uncertainly 
directed. 

He  was  not  long  in  recovering  from  the  effect  of  the 
misfortunes  narrated  in  the  last  chapter.  The  relief  of 
Latin  verses  came  to  the  aid  of  his  natural  elasticity ;  and 
at  Tours,  whither  he  made  his  way  from  the  coast  of  Brit- 
tany, we  find  him  within  a  week  or  two  busy  upon  the 
composition  of  a  mythologic  poem  in  that  language — 
Ulysses  in  Argiripa—'va.  the  course  of  which  the  person- 
ages of  some  of  his  Welsh  tormentors — Betham  and  his 
sister,  and  an  Abergavenny  attorney  named  Gabell  —  are 
ingeniously  introduced  and  pilloried.'  Of  his  quarrel  with 
his  wife  he  writes  perfectly  like  a  gentleman,  doing  justice 
to  her  contentment  and  moderation  during  the  trying  ex- 
periences of  their  life  at  Llanthony,  proposing  to  hand  over 
to  her  all  his  remaining  fortune,  reserving  only  160Z.  a 
year  for  himself ;  but  adding  that  every  kind  and  tender 
sentiment  towards  her  is  rooted  up  from  his  heart  for  ever. 
When,  however,  he  hears  after  a  while  that  she  has  suffer- 
ed no  less  than  himself,  and  been  very  ill  since  their  dis- 
pute, the  news  banishes  all  traces  of  resentment  from  his 
mind,  and  he  writes  at  once  "  to  comfort  and  console  her." 
The  result  was  for  the  time  being  a  full  reconciliation, 
and  early  in  1815  Mrs.  Landor  joined  her  husband  at 
Tours.  In  the  intervening  months  he  had  been  living 
there  alone,  busying  himself  with  his  reading  and  his  Latin 
verses ;  buying  his  own  provisions  in  the  market,  and  mak- 
'  Ulysses  in  Arffiripa,\ih.  iii.,  vv.  19Y — 209. 


rv.]  TOURS.  T9 

ing  himself  infinitely  popular  among  the  market-women 
by  his  genial,  polite  ways ;  on  the  best  of  terms  also, 
strange  to  say,  with  the  prefect;  and  occasionally  receiv- 
ing the  visit  of  some  choicer  spirit  among  the  English 
residents  or  tourists.  It  was  there  that  he  made  the  ac- 
quaintance, among  others,  of  Francis  Hare,  an  acquaint- 
ance destined  to  ripen  into  a  friendship  which  proved  one 
of  the  closest  and  most  fruitful  of  Landor's  life.  Hare 
brouofht  to  see  him  at  this  time  Mr.,  afterwards  Sir  Rod- 
erick,  Murchison,  in  addressing  whom  in  his  old  age  Lan- 
dor  thus  pleasantly  recalls  the  circumstances : 

"  Upon  the  bank 
Of  Loire  thou  earnest  to  me,  brought  by  Hare, 
The  witty  and  warm-hearted,  passing  through 
That  shady  garden  whose  broad  tower  ascends 
From  chamber  over  chamber ;  there  I  dwelt, 
The  flowers  my  guests,  the  birds  my  pensioners, 
Books  my  companions,  and  but  few  beside." 

After  the  escape  of  Napoleon  from  Elba  the  English 
colony  at  Tours  broke  up  in  alarm ;  but  Landor,  on  his  part, 
wrote  to  Carnot,  saying  that  he  proposed  to  remain ;  re- 
ceived in  answer  a  courteous  assurance  of  protection  ;  and, 
in  fact,  stayed  unmolested  at  Tours  throughout  the  Hun- 
dred Days.  After  the  catastrophe  of  Waterloo  he  one  day 
saw  dismount,  in  the  courtyard  of  the  prefect's  house,  a 
traveller  in  whom  he  recognized,  or  at  least  always  after- 
wards imagined  that  he  had  recognized,  the  fugitive  Em- 
peror himself. 

France  under  the  restored  Bourbons  had  no  charms  for 
Landor.  His  wife  and  his  brother  Robert  were  now  with 
him.  The  latter  had  a  strong  desire  to  visit  Italy  ;  Lan- 
dor insisted  that  they  should  travel  together;  and  in  the 
month  of  September,  1815,  "after  contests  with  his  land- 


80  LANDOR.  [chap. 

lady  of  the  most  tremendous  description,"  they  set  ofiE  ac- 
cordingly. They  posted  through  France  to  Savoy,  along 
a  route  beset  on  the  right  hand  by  the  French  forces,  and 
on  the  left  by  the  German  army  of  occupation.  An  ac- 
count of  their  journey  is  preserved  in  the  letters  written 
by  Robert  Landor  to  his  mother — letters  which  betoken 
some  measure  both  of  chivalrous  prejudice  in  favour  of 
the  pretty,  reconciled,  and  now,  as  it  would  appear,  some- 
what ostentatiously  meek  and  submissive  sister-in-law,  and 
of  brotherly  impatience  with  Walter's  moods  and  caprices. 
When  the  travellers  had  made  their  way  as  far  as  Savoy,  Lan- 
dor found  himself  enchanted  with  the  scenery  of  that  prov- 
ince, and  for  a  moment  thought  of  fixing  his  abode  at 
Chambery,  but  finally  decided  to  push  on  into  Italy.  Before 
the  end  of  the  year  he  had  arrived  with  his  wife  at  Como, 
where  he  found  himself  disappointed  and  discontented  at 
first,  but  where,  after  a  time,  he  determined  to  settle  down. 
At  Como  Landor  and  his  wife  continued  to  live  for  the 
next  three  years.  Before  the  summer  of  the  third  a  boy 
was  born  to  them,  their  first  child,  whom  Landor  chris- 
tened Arnold  Savage,  after  that  Speaker  of  the  House  of 
Commons  whom  he  conceived  to  be  an  ancestor  of  his 
own  by  the  mother's  side ;  other  children,  a  girl  and  two 
more  boys,  followed  within  a  few  years.  Landor  delight- 
ed in  the  ways  and  company  of  children,  and  is  the  author 
of  some  of  the  most  beautiful  of  all  sayings  about  them. 
His  own,  as  long  as  they  were  of  tender  age,  were  a  source 
of  extreme  happiness  to  him ;  and  their  presence  had  for 
some  years  the  effect  of  bringing  peace  at  any  rate,  al- 
though no  real  concord,  into  his  home  relations.  For  the 
rest,  in  his  life  at  Como  as  in  his  life  at  Llanthony,  and  in- 
deed at  all  times,  Landor  was  never  so  much  taken  up  by 
anything  as  by  his  own  reflexions ;  and  no  company  was 


rv.]  COMO.  81 

so  real  to  him  as  that  with  which  he  associated  in  imagi- 
nation during  his  daily  walks  and  nightly  musings.  In 
the  way  of  practical  contact  with  men  during  the  period 
while  he  lived  at  Como  there  is  not  much  to  tell.  Among 
his  few  visitors  from  abroad  was  "  the  learned  and  modest 
Bekker ;"  and  he  speaks  of  the  "  calm  and  philosophical 
Sironi"  as  his  most  frequent  companion  among  the  na- 
tives of  the  place.  He  had  also  some  acquaintance  in 
1817  with  an  Englishman  then  resident  near  the  lake,  Sir 
Charles  Wolseley,  afterwards  conspicuous  as  one  of  the 
leaders  of  the  Birmingham  reform  agitation.  They  were 
both  witnesses  to  the  scandalous  life  led  by  the  Princess 
of  Wales  in  the  villa  on  the  lake  where  she  was  then  re- 
siding ;  and  Landor  was,  or  imagined  himself  to  be,  sub- 
ject to  some  insult  or  annoyance  from  those  of  her  suite. 
"  This  alone,"  he  wrote  three  years  afterwards  in  his  chiv- 
alrous way,  when  the  same  Sir  Charles  Wolseley  brought 
forward  his  name  as  that  of  one  in  a  position  to  give  valu- 
able evidence  on  her  trial,  "  this  alone,  which  might  create 
and  keep  alive  the  most  active  resentment  in  others,  would 
impose  eternal  silence  on  me."  Of  these  and  other  mat- 
ters Landor  wrote  frequently  to  Southey,  whom  he  also 
kept  supplied  with  presents  of  books,  collected  chiefly  in 
the  course  of  excursions  to  Milan,  On  his  own  account 
Landor  was  never  much  of  a  book  collector,  or  rather  he 
never  kept  many  of  the  books  he  bought,  but  mastered, 
meditated,  and  then  gave  them  away.  It  was  always  a 
matter  of  remark  how  disproportionate  was  the  extent  of 
his  library  to  that  of  his  reading.  In  the  summer  of  1817 
Landor  received  a  visit  at  Como  from  Southey  in  person. 
"  Well  do  I  remember,"  he  makes  Southey  say  in  one  of 
his  subsequent  Imaginary  Conversations — "  well  do  I  re- 
member our  long  conversations  in  the  silent  and  solitary 


82  LANDOR.  [chap. 

church  of  Sant'  Abondio  (surely  the  coolest  spot  in  Italy), 
and  bow  often  I  turned  back  my  head  towards  the  open 
door,  fearing  lest  some  pious  passer-by,  or  some  more  dis- 
tant one  in  the  wood  above,  pursuing  the  pathway  that 
leads  to  the  tower  of  Luitprand,  should  hear  the  roof  echo 
with  your  laughter  at  the  stories  you  had  collected  about 
the  brotherhood  and  sisterhood  of  the  place." 

But  Southey's  spirits  were  on  this  occasion  not  what 
they  had  been  in  the  old  Llanthony  days.  He  had  lost 
his  son  Herbert,  the  darling  of  his  heart,  twelve  months 
before,  and  had  since  suffered  extreme  vexation  from  the 
attacks  and  the  rebuffs  which  he  had  undergone  in  con- 
nexion with  the  piratical  publication  of  his  Wat  Tyler. 

"  Grief  had  swept  over  him ;  days  darken'd  round : 
BellagiOjValintelvi,  smiled  in  vain, 
And  Monte  Rosa  from  Helvetia  far 
Advanced  to  meet  us,  mild  in  majesty 
Above  the  glittering  crests  of  giant  sons 
Station'd  around  ...  in  vain  too !  all  in  vain." 

Landor's  stay  at  Como  was  brought  to  a  characteristic 
termination  in  the  autumn  of  1818.  An  Italian  poet, 
Monti,  had  written  some  disparaging  verses  against  Eng- 
land. Landor  instantly  retorted  with  his  old  school-boy 
weapons,  and  printed  some  opprobrious  Latin  verses  on 
Monti,  who  summoned  him  before  the  local  courts  on  a 
charge  of  libel.  Thereupon  he  wrote  to  threaten  the  mag- 
istrate with  a  thrashing.  For  this  he  was  ordered  to  quit 
the  country.  The  time  allowed  him  expired  on  the  19th 
of  September.  "  I  remained  a  week  longer,  rather  wishing 
to  be  sent  for  to  Milan."  No  such  result  ensuing,  he  re- 
treated in  a  stately  manner  on  the  28th,  discharging  more 
Latin  verses  as  he  went,  this  time  against  the  Austrian 
Governor,  Count  Strasoldo.      The  next  two  months  he 


IV.]  PISA.  83 

spent  in  a  villa  rented  from  the  Marchese  Pallavacini,  at 
Albaro,  near  Genoa.  Before  the  close  of  the  year  he  had 
gone  on  with  his  family  to  Pisa. 

At  Pisa,  with  the  exception  of  one  summer,  the  first 
after  his  arrival,  which  he  spent  at  Pistoia,  Landor  re- 
mained until  September,  1821.  It  is  a  singular  accident 
in  the  history  of  the  famous  little  Tuscan  city,  that  it 
should  have  been  chosen  by  three  of  the  most  illustrious 
of  modern  Englishmen  for  their  abode  almost  at  the  same 
time.  Shelley  established  himself  there  in  January,  1820, 
a  year  later  than  Landor;  Byron  in  October,  1821,  a 
month  after  Landor  had  left.  With  neither  of  these 
brother  poets  had  Landor  any  personal  acquaintance.  The 
current  slanders  against  Shelley's  character,  especially  in 
connexion  with  the  tragic  issue  of  his  first  marriage,  had 
been  repeated  to  Landor  by  Mackintosh  in  a  form  which 
prevented  him  from  seeking  the  younger  poet's  acquaint- 
ance, or  even  accepting  it  when  it  was  offered,  while  they 
were  both  at  Pisa.  This  Landor  afterwards  bitterly  re- 
gretted. He  had  the  heartiest  admiration  for  Shelley's 
poetry,  and  learned,  when  it  was  too  late,  to  admire  his 
character  no  less.  We  cannot  doubt  that  the  two  would 
have  understood  each  other  if  they  had  met,  and  that 
between  Landor,  the  loftiest  and  most  massive  spirit  of 
his  age,  and  Shelley,  the  most  beautiful  and  ardent,  there 
would  have  sprung  up  relations  full  of  pleasure  for  them- 
selves and  of  interest  for  posterity.  For  Byron,  on  the 
other  hand,  Landor  had  little  admiration  and  less  esteem. 
He  had  gone  out  of  his  way  to  avoid  meeting  him  once  in 
England.  Neither  is  it  certain  that  personal  intercourse 
would  have  led  to  an  improved  understanding  between 
them.  Lan dor's  fastidious  breeding  might  easily  have 
taken  umbrage  at  the  strain  of  vulgarity  there  was  in  By 


84  LAXDOR.  [chap. 

ron ;  his  pride  at  the  other's  trick  of  assumption ;  his  sin- 
cerity at  the  other's  affectations ;  especially  if  Byron  had 
chosen  to  show,  as  he  often  did  show  with  new  acquaint- 
ances, his  worst  side  first.  And  circumstances  soon  arose 
which  would  have  made  friendly  intercourse  between  them 
harder  than  ever. 

But  before  coming  to  these,  it  is  necessary  to  fix  in  our 
minds  the  true  nature  of  Landor's  position,  intellectual 
and  personal,  towards  the  two  opposite  parties  into  which 
the  chief  creative  forces  of  English  literature  were  at  this 
time  divided.     One  of  these  was  a  party  of  conservation 
and  conformity,  the  other  of  expansion  and  revolt.     To 
the  conservative  camp  belonged  the  converted  Jacobins, 
/.  Wordsworth,  Southey,  and  Coleridge,  and,  starting  from  a 
different  point  of  departure,  Scott ;  while  the  men  of  rev- 
T"   olution  were  first  of  all  Byron,  now  in  the  full  blaze  of 
his  notoriety  and  his  fame,  and  Shelley,  whose  name  and 
writings  were  still  comparatively  unknown.    J5he_vvork__ 
of  all  creative  spirits  tends  in  the  long-run  towards  ex-__^ 
pansion-;  towards  the  enrichment  of  human  lives  and  the 
enlargemenY'of  human  ideals.     Wordsworth  by  his  reve^ 
lation  of  the  living  affinities  between  man  and  nature,  and 
of  the  dignity  of  simple  joys  and  passions,  Coleridge  by 
introducing  into  the  inert  mass  of  English  orthodoxy  and 
literalism  the  leaven  of  German  transcendental  speculation, 
Scott  by  kindling  the  dormant  sympathy  of  the  modern 
mind  with  past  ages,  lives,  and  customs,  were  perhaps  each 
in  his  way  doing  as  much  to  enrich  the  lives  and  enlarge 
the  ideas  of  men  as  either  Shelley,  with  his  auroral  visions 
of  an  emancipated  future  for  the  race,  or  Byron  with  his 
dazzling  illustration  of  the  principle  of  rebellion  in  his 
own  person.    But  so  far  as  contains  the  religious,  political, 
and  social  forms  surrounding  them,  the  creative  spirits, 


IV.]  PISA.  8S 

with  the  exception  of  a  few  who,  like  Keats,  stand  apart, 
"and  simply  sing  the  most  heart -easing  things,"  divide 
themselves,  like  other  men,  into  two  parties,  one  seeing 
nothing  keenly  but  the  good,  and  the  other  nothing  keen- 
ly but  the  evil,  in  what  is — one  fearing  all,  and  the  other 
hoping  all,  from  change.  The  natural  position  of  Landor 
was  midwa,y  between  the  two.  On  the  one  hand,  he  was 
incapable  of  such  parochial  rusticity  and  narrowness  as 
marked  the  judgments  of  Wordsworth  in  matters  lying 
outside  the  peculiar  kindling  power  of  his  genius;  or  of 
such  vague,  metaphysical  reconciliations  between  the  exist- 
ing and  the  ideal  as  contented  Coleridge ;  or  of  Southey's 
blind  antagonism  to  change ;  or  of  Scott's  romantic  par- 
tiality for  feudal  and  kingly  forms  and  usages.  But,  on 
the  other  hand,  Landor  saw  human  nature  not  in  the  ethe- 
real, disembodied,  iridescent  semblance  which  it  bore  to""  (^•'T^^^^^ 
the  imagination  of  Shelley,  but  in  its  "practical  attributes  '\ 

of  flesh^nTd  blood,  and  his  watchwords  by  no  means  in- 
cluded, like  those  of  the  younger  poet,  the  universal  indig- 
nant rejection  of  all  hereditary  beliefs  and  bondages  to- 
gether. Neither  did  Landor,  in  sharing  Byron's  hatred 
of  political  tyranny  and  contempt  for  conventional  judg- 
ments, indulge  in  anything  like  Byron's  clamorous  parade 
or  cynic  recklessness,  but  upheld  and  cherished  whatever 
was  really  respectable  in  respectability,  and  maintained  in- 
violate his  antique  principle  of  decorum  even  in  rebellion. 
In  spite  of  the  turbulent  reputation  he  had  earned  by  his 
various  collisions  with  authority,  Landor  regarded  himself,  ^ 
to  use  his  own  words,  as  "radically  a  conservative  in  every- 
thing  useful."  In  the  matter  of  religious  belief  and  prac- 
tice he  is  commonly  spoken  of  as  a  pagan,  but  his  habits 
of  thought  were  rather  what  are  now-a-days  termed  posi- 
tive ;  that  is  to  say,  he  held  the  ultimate  mysteries  of  the 


86  LANDOR.  [chap. 

universe  insoluble  either  by  theology  or  philosophy,  and 
estimated  creeds  and  doctrines  simply  according  to  their 
effect  on  human  happiness. 

"  Divinity  is  little  worth  having,  much  less  paying  for,  unless  she 
teaches  humanity.  The  use  of  religion  on  earth  is  to  inculcate  the 
moral  law ;  in  other  words,  in  the  words  of  Jesus  Christ,  to  love  our 
neighbour  as  ourselves." 

And  again,  in  setting  practical  over  doctrinal  religion : 

"  Christianity,  as  I  understand  it,  lies  not  in  belief  but  in  action. 
That  servant  is  a  good  servant  who  obeys  the  just  orders  of  his  mas- 
ter ;  not  he  who  repeats  his  words,  measures  his  stature,  or  traces 
his  pedigree." 

Accepting  Christianity  in  this  sense,  Landor  was  never 
tired  of  enforcing  the  contrast  between  the  practical  re- 
ligion of  the  gospels  and  the  oflBcial  and  doctrinal  religion 
of  priests  and  kings.  In  like  manner  as  regards  philoso- 
phy ;  for  abstract  and  metaphysical  speculations  he  had  no 
sympathy,  scarcely  even  any  toleration. 

"  The  business  of  philosophy  is  to  examine  and  estimate  all  those 
things  which  come  within  the  cognizance  of  the  understanding. 
Speculations  on  any  that  lie  beyond  are  only  pleasant  dreams,  leav- 
ing the  mind  to  the  lassitude  of  disappointment.  They  are  easier 
than  geometry  and  dialectics ;  they  are  easier  than  the  efforts  of  a 
well-regulated  imagination  in  the  structure  of  a  poem." 

To  the  same  purport,  Diogenes  is  made  to  reply  to  Plato : 

"  I  meddle  not  at  present  with  infinity  or  eternity ;  when  I  can 
comprehend  them,  I  will  talk  about  them.  You  metaphysicians  kill 
the  flower-bearing  and  fruit-bearing  glebe  with  delving,  and  turning 
over,  and  sifting,  and  never  bring  up  any  solid  and  malleable  mass 
from  the  dark  profundity  in  which  you  labour.  The  intellectual 
world,  like  the  physical,  is  inapplicable  to  profit  and  incapable  of 
cultivation  a  little  way  below  the  surface." 


IV.]  PISA.  87 

Neither  could  Landor  admit  that  philosophy,  even  in  the 
sense  above  defined,  that  is  philosophy  dealing  with  the 
facts  of  life  and  experience,  could  be  profitably  pursued 
apart  from  directly  practical  issues.  Human  welfare,  and 
not  abstract  truth,  should  be  its  aim. 

"  This  is  philosophy,  to  make  remote  things  tangible,  common 
things  extensively  useful,  useful  things  extensively  common,  and  to 
leave  the  least  necessary  for  the  last. . . .  Truth  is  not  reasonably  the 
main  and  ultimate  object  of  philosophy;  philosophy  should  seek 
truth  merely  as  the  means  of  acquiring  and  propagating  happiness." 

In  politics  Landor  was  by  no  means  the  mere  rebel 
which  a  saying  of  Carlyle's,  repeated  by  Emerson,  has 
tended  to  represent  him.  He  was,  indeed,  the  staunchest 
friend  of  liberty — understanding  by  liberty  the  right  of 
every  human  being  "to  enjoy  his  reason  for  the  promo- 
tion of  his  happiness" — and  the  most  untiring  enemy  of 
all  forms  of  despotism,  usurpation,  persecution,  or  corrup- 
tion which  in  his  view  interfered  with  that  right.  Beyond 
this,  he  was  far  from  being  in  any  general  sense  a  political 
innovator  or  leveller.  With  democracy  he  had  no  sym- 
pathy, regarding  that  majority  of  all  ranks,  whom  he  called 
"  the  vulgar,"  as  of  infinitely  less  importance  in  a  com- 
monwealth than  its  two  or  three  great  men.  "A  mob,"  he 
says,  "  is  not  worth  a  man."  Accordingly,  he  was  no  great 
believer  in  popular  suffrage,  and  would  on  no  account  con- 
descend to  personal  contact  with  its  processes  and  instru- 
ments. He  prided  himself  on  never  having  made  use  of 
the  votes  which  he  possessed  in  four  counties,  or  entered 
a  club,  or  been  present  at  a  political  meeting.  Revolu- 
tionist as  he  was  in  regard  to  the  despotic  governments 
of  the  continent,  convinced  as  he  always  continued  to  be 
of  the  schoolboy  doctrine  of  the  virtue  of  tyrannicide,  he 


88  LANDOR.  [chap. 

advocated  no  very  sweeping  reforms  in  the  politics  of  his 
native  country.  He  would  "  change  little,  but  correct 
much."  He  believed  greatly  in  the  high  qualities  of  his 
own  order,  the  untitled  gentry  of  England,  and  was  fond 
of  scheming  such  a  reform  of  the  peerage  as  should  con- 
vert that  body  from  a  more  or  less  corrupt  and  degenerate 
oligarchy  into  a  genuine  aristocracy  of  worth  and  talent. 
He  was,  as  we  have  seen,  a  great  denouncer  of  what  he 
thought  the  trucklings,  derogations,  and  quackeries  of  or- 
dinary political  practice  and  partisanship  ;  but  his  chief 
practical  exhortations  were  against  wars  of  conquest  and 
^  annexation ;  against  alliance  with  the  despotic  powers  for 
the  suppression  of  insurgent  nationalities ;  against  the 
over-endowment  of  ecclesiastical  dignitaries;  in  favour  of 
the  removal  of  Catholic  disabilities ;  in  favour  of  factory 
acts,  of  the  mitigation  of  the  penal  laws,  and  of  ecclesias- 
tical and  agrarian  legislation  for  the  relief  of  the  Irish. 

If  Landor  by  his  general  opinions  thus  stood  midway 
between  the  conservative  and  revolutionary  groups  of  his 
i    contemporaries,  we  have  seen  already  on  which  side  of  the 
^    two  his  literary  sympathies  were  engaged.     He  belonged 
to  the  generation  of  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  Southey,  and 
Charles  Lamb,  and  had  grown  up  in  admiration  of  the 
(^p-'^^       writings  of  the  so-called  Lake  school  for  years  before  their 
light  was  dimmed  by  the  younger  star  of  Byron.     At^the— 
same  time,  Landor  was  essentially  the  reverse  of  a  parti- 
san ;  his  literary  judgments  were  perfectly  open,  and  he 
was  nobly  eager  to  acknowledge  merit  whenever  he  could 
perceive  it.     If  he  can  be  charged  with  partisanship  in^ 
any  instance,  it  is  in  that  of  Southey,  whom  he  placed  as , 
a  poet  not  only  far  above  his  young  antagonist  Byron,  \ 
but  above  Wordsworth  also.     For  this  mistake,  Landor's 
loyal  and  devoted  friendship  is  undoubtedly  in  part  re- 


iT.l  PISA.  89 

/ 

sponsible.  'As  between  Southey  and  Byron,  however,  we 
must  remember  that  the  excellencies  of  the  one  and  the 
faults  of  the  other  were  precisely  of  the  kind  most  cal- 
culated to  impress  Landor.  He  looked  in  literature  first 
of  all  to  the  technical  points  of  form  and  workmanship, 
Southey  was  one  of  the  soundest  and  most  scrupulous  of  -^ 

workmen ;  Byron  one  of  the  most  impetuous  and  lax ; 
and  considering  how  rarely  poets  have  ever  judged  aright 
of  each  other,  how  hard  it  is  for  any  man  ever  to  judge 
aright  of  a  contemporary,  we  shall  not  too  much  wonder 
if  Landor  failed  to  see  that  the  skilful,  versatile,  level, 
industrious  poetry  of  Southey  contained  nothing  which 
would  strongly  interest  a  second  generation,  while  that  of 
the  other,  with  its  glaring  faults,  its  felicities  that  seem  so 
casual  even  when  they  are  most  irresistible,  its  headlong 
current  over  rough  and  smooth,  was  the  utterance  of  a 
personality  that  would  impress  and  fascinate  posterity  to 
the  latest  day. 

All  these  relations  of  Landor  to  his  contemporaries 
come  into  the  light  in  the  course  of  his  correspondence 
and  his  work  at  Pisa.  His  intercourse  with  Southey,  in 
the  shape  of  letters  and  consignments  of  books,  is  as  close 
as  ever.  We  find  him  also  in  correspondence  with  Words- 
worth himself,  on  terms  of  great  mutual  respect  and  cour- 
tesy. On  the  literary  controversies  of  the  hour  Landor 
printed  some  just  and  striking  observations,  although  in 
a  form  which  prevented  them  from  making  any  impres- 
sion on  the  public  mind,  in  a  book  published  at  Pisa  in 
1820.  This  was  the  volume  called  Idyllia  Heroica,  con- 
taining the  carefully  matured  fruits  of  all  his  Latin  studies 
and  exercises  during  many  years  past.  The  earlier  Oxford 
edition,  printed,  as  we  have  seen,  about  the  time  Landor 
was  leaving  Llanthony,  had  contained,  besides  other  mis- 
G    5 


90  LANDOR.  [chap. 

cellaneous  matter,  five  heroic  tales  or  idyls  in  hexameter 
verse ;  this  Pisa  edition  contains  ten,  most  of  which  Lan- 
dor  afterwards  turned  into  English  for  his  volume  entitled 
Hellenics,  and  upwards  of  fifty  sets  of  hendecasyllabics. 
Like  all  the  really  original  writing  of  the  moderns  in  this 
language,  Landor's  Latin  poems  are  not  easy  reading.  Hi»_ 
style  is  completely  personal,  as  indeed  we  should  expect 
from  a  scholar  who  used  Latin  often  by  preference  for  the 
expression  of  his  most  intimate  thoughts  and  feelings;  it 
does  not  recall  the  diction  or  cadences  of  any  given  mas- 
ter; it  is  not  perfectly  free  from  grammatical  and  proso- 
dial  slips ;  but  it  is  remarkably  spontaneous,  energetic,  and 
alive.  The  volume  concludes  with  a  long  critical  essay, 
developed  from  the  Qucestiuncula  of  1803,  on  the  cultiva- 
tion and  use  of  Latin — De  cultu  atque  usu  Latini  ser- 
monis. 

This  essay  contains  much  that  would,  if  Landor  had 
only  written  it  in  his  noble  English  instead  of  his  only 
less  noble  Latin,  have  counted  among  his  most  interesting 
work.  He  has  written,  he  says,  because  too  much  leisure 
is  prejudicial  alike  to  virtue  and  to  happiness;  and  he 
has  published  his  work  in  Italy  because  he  desires  to  avoid 
being  confounded  by  those  among  whom  he  is  sojourning 
with  the  promiscuous  crowd  of  travelling  Englishmen  {quia 
nolui  turmalis  esse,  nolui  opinione  hominum  cum  cceteris 
Britannorum  peregrinantium,  cujuscumque  sint  ordinis, 
conturbari).  His  avowed  purpose  is  the  paradoxical  one 
of  pleading  for  the  Latin  language  as  that  proper  to  be 
used  by  all  civilized  nations  for  the  expression  of  their 
most  dignified  and  durable  thoughts.  Why  should  those 
be  called  the  dead  languages  which  alone  will  never  die? 
Why  should  any  one  choose  to  engrave  on  glass  when  it 
is  open  to  him  to  engrave  on  beryl-stone  ?     What  literary 


IV.]  LDYLLIA  HEROICA.  91 

pleasure  can  be  so  great  to  a  man  as  that  of  composing 
in  the  lanffuao-e  of  his  earliest  and  most  fruitful  lessons? 
English,  even  English,  may  decay,  for  there  are  signs 
abroad  of  the  decadence  of  England's  polity,  and  that  of 
her  language  cannot  fail  to  follow  ;  but  Latin  has  survived 
and  will  continue  to  survive  all  the  vicissitudes  of  time. 
And  much  more  to  the  same  effect ;  to  which  is  added  a 
condensed  critical  narrative  of  the  history  of  Latin  poetry 
since  the  Renaissance,  bespeaking  a  prodigious  familiarity 
with  a  literature  to  most  people  neither  familiar  nor  inter- 
esting. This  is  interspersed  with  criticisms,  in  like  man- 
ner succinct  and  authoiitative,  on  the  principal  poets  of 
ancient  Rome,  and  with  many  searching  observations,  both 
general  and  analytic,  on  the  poets  and  poetry  of  England. 
Landor  has  also  his  fling  at  France,  remarking  how  the 
once  vaunted  Henriade  of  Voltaire  has  sunk  to  the  level 
of  a  lesson-book  for  teaching  heroic  metre — and  heroic 
patience — to  the  young;  but  contrasting,  on  the  other 
hand,  the  treatment  of  poets  in  France,  where  every  man 
takes  to  himself  a  share  of  their  glory,  with  their  treat- 
ment in  England,  where  no  man  will  tolerate  any  poetic 
glory  except  his  own.  In  the  course  of  the  discussion 
Landor  finds  occasion  for  several  of  his  striking  sentences 
— as  this,  that  every  great  poet  is  in  some  sort  the  creator 
of  that  man  who  appreciates  the  delights  of  the  Paradise 
prepared  by  him  {magnus  poeta  quisque  creator  hominis 
istius  qui,  liceat  ita  dicere,  Paradiso  suo  fruatur). 

With  reference  to  the  English  writers  of  his  own  day, 
Landor  has  a  fine  and,  on  the  whole,  a  just  outburst  against 
the  Broughams,  Jeffreys,  and  their  meaner  rivals  or  satel- 
lites in  the  trade  of  criticism  as  then  practised ;  followed 
by  an  apostrophe  to  Wordsworth — "  admirable  man,  cit- 
izen, philosopher,  poet !"  —  whom  neither  seclusion,  nor 
30 


92  LANDOR.  [cavp. 

dignity  of  life,  nor  the  common  reverence  of  men,  has 
I  been  able  to  protect  from  the  virulence  of  these  enemies 

▲  of  all  good  men  and  writers.     And  yet,  if  only  he  had 

been  dead  before  they  vrere  born,  these  same  traducers 
would  have  been  the  foremost  to  bring  their  incense  to 
his  tomb.  Coming  to  Byron,  Landor  begins  with  the  say- 
ing that  the  greatest  poets  have  in  all  times  been  good 
men,  and  there  is  no  worse  mistake  than  to  suppose  vice 
the  natural  concomitant  of  genius.  But  most  men  prefer 
the  second-best  to  the  best;  and  when  there  appears  a 
writer  of  talent  and  fertility,  whose  life  and  style  are  alike 
full  of  showy  faults,  he  is  sure  of  notoriety  and  acclama- 
tion. The  true  advice  for  him  is  to  mend  his  morals,  to 
be  more  careful  of  his  style,  to  control  the  ardours  of  his 
temperament,  to  rush  less  hastily  into  print,  and  then  by 
the  time  he  is  forty  he  may  well  produce  something  epi- 
cal and  truly  great  {ingens  nescio  quid  et  vere  epicum}. 
The  passage  is  far  from  being  either  unkind  or  unjust. 
Southey  in  the  next  year  quoted  it,  adding  words  expres- 
sive of  his  enthusiastic  regard  and  admiration  for  its  au- 
thor, in  a  note  to  the  preface  of  his  Vision  of  Judgment. 
This  is  the  preface  in  which  Southey  made  his  famous 
attack  upon  Byron  and  the  "  Satanic  school ;"  an  attack 
which,  with  the  inconceivably  unlucky  performance  which 
followed  it  in  the  shape  of  an  apotheosis  of  George  III.  in 
lumbering  and  lame  hexameters,  gave  Byron,  who,  as  he 
said,  "  liked  a  row,"  an  opportunity  too  good  to  be  lost. 
We  all  know  the  consequences.  If  Southey's  attack  is 
remembered,  it  is  because  of  Byron's  never-to-be-forgotten 
retort.  I  speak  not  of  the  prose  correspondence,  in  which 
Byron  with  his  sneers  and  his  unfairness  makes  no  such 
honourable  figurfc  as  his  injudicious  but  sincerely  indig- 
nant and  perfectly  loyal  antagonist,  but  of  Byron's  o\vn 


IT.]  IDYLLIA  HEROICA.  93 

poetic,  mocking,  and  immortal  Vision.  In  a  note  to  this 
Byron  dealt  a  passing  thrust  at  the  laureate's  incongruous 
friend  Savagius,  or  Savage  Landor — "  such  is  his  grim 
cognomen  " — "  who  cultivates  much  private  renown  in  the 
shape  of  Latin  verses,"  and  whose  opinion  of  his  late  sov- 
ereign was  so  strikingly  at  variance  with  that  of  his  friend. 
Byron  next  returned  to  the  charge  against  Landor  in  a 
note  to  The  Island.  Having  in  this  poem  avowedly  par- 
aphrased Landor's  lines  upon  a  sea -shell  in  Gehir,  v/hidT^ 
he  had  heard  Shelley  recite,  Byron  takes  occasion  to  de- 
clare that  he  has  never  read  the  poem,  and  to  quote  Gif- 
ford's  opinion  that  the  rest  of  it  is  "  trash  of  the  worst 
and  most  insane  description."  Then  again  there  are  the 
well-known  lines  in  Don  Juan — 

"  And  that  deep-mouthed  Beotian  Savage  Landor 
Has  taken  for  a  swan  rogue  Southey's  gander." 

"  De^-mouthed  "  is  good ;  and  in  all  this  there  was  much 
more  mischief  than  malice  on  Byron's  part.  His  account 
of  his  real  feelings  towards  Landor  is  extant,  in  the  diluted 
report  of  Lady  Blessington,  as  follows : 

"  At  Pisa  a  friend  told  me  that  Walter  Savage  Landor  had  de- 
clared he  either  would  not  or  could  not  read  my  works.  I  asked  my 
officious  friend  if  he  was  sure  which  it  was  that  Landor  said,  as  the 
would  not  was  not  offensive,  and  the  coidd  not  was  highly  so.  After 
some  reflection,  he,  of  course  en  ami,  chose  the  most  disagreeable 
signification ;  and  I  marked  down  Landor  in  the  tablet  of  memory 
as  a  person  to  whom  a  coup-de-patte  must  be  given  in  my  forthcoming 
work,  though  he  really  is  a  man  whose  brilliant  talents  and  profound  ( 
erudition  I  cannot  help  admiring  as  much  as  I  respect  his  character." 

Landor's  retort  to  the  Byronic  coicps-de-patte  appeared 
presently  in  the  shape  of  an  apologue,  in  one  of  his  Con- 
versations, where  the   personage    of  Byron   is   shadowed 


94  LANDOR.  [chap, 

/ 

'  forth  under  tliat  of  Mr.  George  Nelly,  an  imaginary  son 

of  Lord  Rochester's : 

"  Whenever  he  wrote  a  bad  poem,  he  supported  his  sinking  fame 
by  some  signal  act  of  profligacy,  an  elegy  by  a  seduction,  an  heroic 
by  an  adultery,  a  tragedy  by  a  divorce.  On  the  remark  of  a  learned 
man,  that  irregularity  is  no  indication  of  genius,  he  began  to  lose 
ground  rapidly,  when  on  a  sudden  he  cried  out  at  the  Haymarket, 
There  is  no  God.  It  was  then  surmised  more  generally  and  more 
gravely  that  there  was  something  in  him,  and  he  stood  upon  his  legs 
almost  to  the  last.  Say  what  you  will,  once  whispered  a  friend  of 
mine,  there  are  things  in  him  strong  as  poison,  and  original  as  sin." 

The  subjects  discussed  in  Landor's  Latin  essay  had 
been  literary  alone.  But  other  things  besides  literature 
occupied  his  thoughts  in  these  years  at  Pisa.  In  1819 
and  the  following  years  began  the  first  stirrings  of  those 
political  movements  which  are  not  ended  yet — the  first 
uprisings,  after  the  settlement  of  1815,  of  the  spirit  of 
liberty  and  nationality  against  dynasties  and  despotisms. 
The  Spanish  republics  of  South  America  had  struck  for 
freedom  against  the  mother  country ;  the  Spaniards  them- 
selves next  rose  against  their  king,  the  restored  and  per- 
jured Ferdinand ;  the  flame  spread  to  Italy,  where  the  flag 
of  revolt  was  raised  against  the  Bourbons  in  Naples  and 
the  Austrians  in  Lombardy,  and  to  Greece,  where  peasant 
and  brigand,  trader  and  pirate,  women  and  children,  young 
and  old,  on  a  sudden  astonished  the  world  with  deeds  of 
desperate  and  successful  heroism  against  the  Turk.  All 
these  movements  Landor  followed  with  passionate  sym- 
pathy, and  with  corresponding  detestation  the  measures 
of  the  Holy  Alliance  for  their  repression,  the  deliberations 
of  the  Congress  of  Verona,  and  the  French  invasion  of 
Spain.  Canning's  tentative  and  half-hearted  efforts  in  the 
cause  of  liberty  he  condemned  scarcely  less  than  the  des- 


IV.]  WANDERINGS  IN  FRANCE  AND  ITALY.  95 

potic  predilections  of  Castlereagb.  He  would  have  had 
England  strike  everywhere  for  the  oppressed  against  the 
oppressor.  His  own  Spanish  title  and  decoration  Landor 
had  indignantly  sent  back  on  the  violation  by  Ferdinand 
of  his  Charter.  He  now  (1821)  addressed  to  the  people 
of  Italy  an  essay  or  oration  on  representative  government, 
written  in  their  own  language,  which  he  by  this  time 
wrote  and  spoke  with  freedom,  though  his  speaking  accent 
was  strongly  English  to  the  last.  From  these  years  date 
many  of  the  thoughts  and  feelings  to  which  he  gave  ex- 
pression during  those  next  ensuing  in  his  political  dialogues. 
Poems  like  Shelley's  Hellas  and  his  Ode  to  Naples  have 
their  counterpart  in  the  work  of  Landor,  in  two  pieces  in- 
spired at  this  time  by  the  European,  and  especially  the 
Greek,  revolution.  One  is  addressed  to  Corinth  ;  the  other 
is  called  Begeneration ;  both  illustrate  the  noblest  altitudes 
— and,  at  the  same  time,  it  must  be  said,  the  curious  bald- 
nesses and  depressions — of  which  Landor's  poetic  thought 
and  poetic  style  were  capable,  I  quote  the  best  part  of 
the  second.  The  reference  towards  the  end  is  to  the  de- 
struction of  the  Turkish  fleet  by  Canaris  with  his  two  fire- 
ships  and  handful  of  men : 

"  We  are  what  suns  and  winds  and  waters  make  us ; 
The  mountains  are  our  sponsors,  and  the  rills 
Fashion  and  win  their  nurshng  with  their  smiles. 
But  where  the  land  is  dim  from  tyranny, 
There  tiny  pleasures  occupy  the  place 
Of  glories  and  of  duties  ;  as  the  feet 
Of  fabled  faeries  when  the  sun  goes  down 
Trip  o'er  the  grass  where  wrestlers  strove  by  day. 
Then  Justice,  call'd  the  Eternal  One  above, 
Is  more  inconstant  than  the  buoyant  form 
That  bursts  into  existence  from  the  froth 
Of  ever-varying  ocean  :  what  is  best 


96  LAi^DOR.  [CHAP. 

Then  becomes  worst;  what  loveliest, most  deform' d. 

The  heart  is  hardest  in  the  softest  climes, 

The  passions  flourish,  the  affections  die. 

0  thou  vast  tablet  of  these  awful  truths 

That  fillest  all  the  space  between  the  seas, 

Spreading  from  Venice's  deserted  courts 

To  the  Tarentine  and  Hydruntine  mole, 

What  lifts  thee  up  ?  what  shakes  thee  ?  'tis  the  breath 

Of  God.     Awake,  ye  nations  !  spring  to  life ! 

Let  the  last  work  of  his  right  hand  appear 

Fresh  with  his  image,  Man.     Thou  recreant  slave 

That  sittest  afar  off  and  helpest  not, 

0  thou  degenerate  Albion !  with  what  shame 

Do  I  survey  thee,  pushing  forth  the  spunge 

At  thy  spear's  length,  in  mocking  at  the  thirst 

Of  holy  Freedom  in  his  agony. 

And  prompt  and  keen  to  pierce  the  wounded  side. 

Must  Italy  then  wholly  rot  away 

Amid  her  slime,  before  she  germinate 

Into  fresh  vigour,  into  form  again  ? 

What  thunder  bursts  upon  mine  ear  ?  some  isle 

Hath  surely  risen  from  the  gulphs  profound, 

Eager  to  suck  the  sunshine  from  the  breast 

Of  beauteous  Nature,  and  to  catch  the  gale 

From  golden  Hermus  and  Melena's  brow. 

A  greater  thing  than  isle,  than  continent. 

Than  earth  itself,  than  ocean  circling  earth. 

Hath  risen  there ;  regenerate  Man  hath  risen. 

Generous  old  bard  of  Chios  !  not  that  Jove 

Deprived  thee  in  thy  latter  days  of  sight 

Would  I  complain,  but  that  no  higher  theme 

Than  a  disdainful  youth,  a  lawless  king, 

A  pestilence,  a  pyre,  awoke  thy  song, 

When  on  the  Chian  coast,  one  javelin's  throw 

From  where  thy  tombstone,  where  thy  cradle  stood, 

Twice  twenty  self-devoted  Greeks  assail'd 

The  naval  host  of  Asia,  at  one  blow 

Scattered  it  into  air  .  .  .  and  Greece  was  free  .  .  . 

And  ere  these  glories  beam'd,  thy  day  had  closed. 


17.]  PISA.  97 

Let  all  that  Elis  ever  saw  give  way, 
All  that  Olympian  Jove  e'er  smiled  upon : 
The  Marathonian  columns  never  told 
A  tale  more  glorious,  never  Salamis, 
Nor,  faithful  in  the  centre  of  the  false, 
Platea,  nor  Anthela,  from  whose  mount 
Benignant  Ceres  warda  the  blessed  Laws, 
And  sees  the  Amphictyon  dip  his  weary  foot 
In  the  warm  streamlet  of  the  straits  below." 


CHAPTER  V. 

LIFE    AT    FLORENCE THE    IMAGINARY    CONVERSATIONS. 

[1821—1829.] 

Both  in  telling  of  Landor's  literary  collisions  with  Byron, 
and  in  tracing  the  course  of  his  sympathies  with  the  in- 
surgent populations  of  Southern  Europe,  we  have  been  led 
beyond  the  strict  limits  of  his  stay  at  Pisa.  He  left  that 
city  in  September,  1821;  and  left  it,  strange  to  say,  at 
peace,  having  had  only  one  slight  brush  with  authority, 
and  that  only  with  the  censorship  of  the  press,  concerning 
a  line  in  one  of  his  Latin  poems.  He  went  next  to  Flor- 
ence, where  he  established  himself  with  his  family  in  a 
handsome  suite  of  apartments  in  the  Medici  palace.  Here 
he  lived  for  five  years,  and  for  the  three  following  princi- 
pally in  a  country  house,  the  Villa  Castiglione,  distant  half 
an  hour's  walk  from  the  same  city. 

During  these  eight  years  Landor  was  engaged,  to  the 
exclusion  of  nearly  all  other  work,  with  the  production  of 
his  Imaginary  Conversations.  The  experimental  part  of 
his  literary  career  had  now  ended,  and  the  period  of  solid 
and  confident  production  had  begun.  He  had  found  the 
form  and  mode  of  expression  that  best  suited  his  genius. 
The  idea  of  writing  prose  dialogues  or  conversations  be- 
tween illustrious  personages  of  the  past  was  no  new  one  in 
his  mind.     In  the  days  of  his  connexion  with  Whig  jour- 


CHAP,  v.]  LIFE  AT  FLORENCE.  99 

nalism,  twenty  years  before,  he  had  offered  to  Adair  for  in- 
sertion in  the  Morning  Chronicle  a  dialogue  between  Burke 
and  Grenville,  which  had  been  declined.  He  had  about  the 
same  time  written  another  between  Henry  IV.  and  Arnold 
Savage.  After  that  he  had  never  regularly  resumed  this 
form  of  composition  until  towards  the  date  of  his  depart- 
ure from  Pisa.  But  it  was  a  form  congenial  to  every  habit 
of  his  mind.  The  greatness  of  great  characters  was  what 
most  impressed  him  in  the  world.  Their  exploits  and  suf- 
ferings, their  potencies  of  intellect  and  will,  the  operation 
of  their  influence  and  example,  were  for  him  the  essence 
of  history.  He  could  not  bring  himself  to  regard  statisti- 
cal or  social  facts,  or  the  working  of  collective  or  imper- 
sonal forces  in  human  affairs,  as  deserving  from  the  histo- 
rian any  commensurate  degree  of  attention  with  the  lives 
and  achievements  of  individuals.  In  this  temper  of  hero- 
worship  Landor  was  a  true  disciple  of  antiquity,  and  he  re- 
garded the  whole  field  of  history  from  the  ancient  point 
of  view.  The  extraordinary  range  and  thoroughness  of  his 
reading  made  him  familiar  with  all  the  leading  figures  of 
Time.  His  dramatic  instinct  prompted  him  to  reanimate 
them  in  thought  with  the  features  and  the  accents  of  life. 
It  was  in  converse  with  these  mute  companions  that  he 
was  accustomed  to  spend  the  best  part  of  his  days  and 
nights.  "  Even  those  with  whom  I  have  not  lived,  and 
whom,  indeed,  I  have  never  seen,  affect  me  by  sympathy  as 
if  I  had  known  them  intimately,  and  I  hold  with  them  in 
my  walks  many  imaginary  conversations."  Elsewhere  Lan- 
dor adorns  and  amplifies  in  his  choicest  vein  this  account 
of  his  own  habits,  in  order  to  transfer  it  to  the  lips  of  Pe- 
trarch. "  When  I  was  younger  I  was  fond  of  wandering 
in  solitary  places,  and  never  was  afraid  of  slumbering  in 
woods  and  grottoes.     Among  the  chief  pleasures  of  my 


y 


100  LANDOR.  [chap. 

life,  and  among  the  commonest  of  my  occupations,  was  the 
bringing  before  me  such  heroes  and  heroines  of  antiquity, 
such  poets  and  sages,  such  of  the  prosperous  and  the  un- 
fortunate, as  most  interested  me  by  their  courage,  their 
eloquence,  or  their  adventures.  Engaging  them  in  the  con- 
versations best  suited  to  their  characters,  I  knew  perfectly 
their  manners,  their  steps,  their  voices :  and  often  did  I 
moisten  with  jjiy  tears  the  models  I  had  been  forming  of 
the  less  happy ."^ 

If  it  was  thus  an  essential  habit  of  Landor's  mind  to 
think  about  persons,  and  dramatically,  to  think  in  frag- 
ments, and  disconnectedly,  was  not  less  so.  In  his  mental 
communion  with  the  heroes  and  heroines  of  the  past,  he 
began  by  framing  for  them  isolated  thoughts  and  sen- 
tences, led  them  on  next  to  an  interchange  of  several,  and 
added  more  by  degrees  until  the  whole  scene  was  filled 
out.  He  confesses  as  much  himself,  in  a  metaphor  which 
is  characteristic  also  of  his  tastes  as  a  lover  of  trees  and 
planting.  "  I  confess  to  you  that  a  few  detached  thoughts 
and  images  have  always  been  the  beginnings  of  my  works. 
Narrow  slips  have  risen  up,  more  or  fewer,  above  the  sur- 
face. These  gradually  became  larger  and  more  consoli- 
dated ;  freshness  and  verdure  first  covered  one  part,  then 
another;  then  plants  of  firmer  and  higher  growth,  how- 
ever scantily,  took  their  places,  then  extended  their  roots 
and  branches ;  and  among  them,  and  around  about  them, 
in  a  little  while  you  yourself,  and  as  many  more  as  I  de- 
sired, found  places  for  study  and  recreation."  Dialogue 
is  a  form  of  literature  in  which  all  these  peculiarities  could 
find  play,  not  only  without  impediment  but  with  advan- 
tage. Accordingly,  Landor  was  himself  astonished  at  the 
abundance  and  the  satisfaction  with  which  he  found  him- 
self pouring  out  his  intellectual  stores  in  this  form  when 


T.]  THE  IMAGINARY  CONVERSATIONS.  101 

he  had  once  begun.  He  was  moved  to  do  so  partly 
by  the  correspondence  of  Soiithey,  who  was  full  at  this 
time  of  a  projected  book  of  Colloquies  of  his  own,  and 
partly  by  the  conversation  and  encouragement  of  Francis 
Hare.  Landor  had  no  idea  at  the  outset  how  far  his  new 
literary  enterprise  was  destined  to  carry  him.  He  still 
meditated,  as  the  great  work  of  his  life,  a  history  to  be 
written  either  in  co-operation  with  Southey  or  separately. 
This  idea  of  working  in  conjunction  with  Southey,  long 
and  seriously  entertained  by  Landor,  is  a  signal  proof, 
coming  from  a  mind  so  rooted  in  independence  and  self- 
sufficiency  as  his,  of  his  unbounded  and  deferential  regard 
for  his  friend.  The  idea  was  gradually  and  naturally 
dropped  somewhat  later,  and  Landor  conceived  instead 
that  of  writing  by  himself,  in  the  form  of  a  series  cff 
letters,  a  systematic  commentary  on  the  history  of  Eng 
land  from  the  year  1775.  In  the  meantime  he  laboured 
impetuously  at  his  dialogues.  He  had  before  him  the  ex- 
amples of  many  illustrious  writers  in  all  ages;  of  Plato, 
Xenophon,  and  Lucian,  of  Cicero  and  Boethius,  of  Eras- 
mus and  More ;  and,  among  English  authors  of  compar- 
atively recent  date,  those  of  Langhorne,  Lyttelton,  and 
Hurd.  It  is  needless  to  say  that  he  did  jiot^losely  fol- 
loWjjnuch-lgssJinitate,  any  of  bis  predecessors.  He  was 
not  at  first  sureoTTEe^method  to  be  adopted,  and  began 
by  planning  set  conversations  on  particular  texts  and  top- 
ics. This  was  soon  given  up,  and  he  wrote  according  to 
the  choice  or  the  preoccupation  of  the  moment.  For  fear 
of  being  at  any  time  caught  echoing  either  the  matter  or 
the  manner  of  any  other  writer,  he  used  to  abstain  alto- 
gether from  reading  before  he  himself  began  to  compose, 
"lest  the  theme  should  haunt  me,  and  some  of  the  ideas 
take  the  liberty  of  playing  with  mine.     I  do  not  wish  the 


102  LANDOR.  [chap. 

children  of  my  brain  to  imitate  the  gait  or  learn  any  tricks 
of  others."  By  the  9th  of  March,  1822,  he  had  finished 
fifteen  dialogues,  and  burnt  two  others  which  had  failed  to 
satisfy  him.  The  manuscript  of  the  fifteen  he  consigned 
not  many  days  later  by  a  private  hand  to  Longmans,  to 
whom  he  at  the  same  time  addressed  his  proposals  for 
their  publication. 

The  parcel  was  delayed  in  delivery,  and  no  answer 
reached  Landor  for  more  than  three  months.  Long  be- 
fore that  his  impatience  had  risen  to  boiling-point.  He 
rushed  headlong  to  the  direst  conclusions.  Of  course  the 
manuscript  had  been  lost;  or  of  course  it  had  been  re- 
fused ;  or  both ;  and  it  was  just  like  his  invariable  ill- 
fortune.  He  was  in  despair.  He  took  to  his  bed.  He 
swore  he  would  never  write  another  line,  and  burnt  what 
he  had  got  by  him  already  written.  "  This  disappointment 
has  brought  back  my  old  bilious  complaint,  together  with 
the  sad  reflection  on  that  fatality  which  has  followed  me 
through  life,  of  doing  everything  in  vain.  I  have,  how- 
ever, had  the  resolution  to  tear  in  pieces  all  my  sketches 
and  projects,  and  to  forswear  all  future  undertakings.  I 
try  to  sleep  away  my  time,  and  pass  two -thirds  of  the 
twenty-four  hours  in  bed.  I  may  speak  of  myself  as  of  a 
dead  man.  I  will  say,  then,  that  these  Conversations  con- 
tained as  forcible  writing  as  exists  on  earth." 

This  was  early  in  June,  and  it  was  not  until  the  end  of 
August  that  news  of  the  manuscript  at  last  arrived.  In 
the  meantime  Landor  had  recovered  his  equanimity,  and 
was  busy  writing  new  dialogues  and  making  additions  to 
the  old.  Longmans,  in  fact,  refused  the  book.  A  whole 
succession  of  other  publishers  to  whom  it  was  offered 
either  refused  it  also,  or  else  offered  terms  which  were  un- 
acceptable.    By  this  time,  however,  Landor  was  again  too 


v.]  THE  IMAGINARY  CONVERSATIONS.  103 

deeply  engrossed  with  the  work  of  writing  to  bestow  much 
attention  or  indignation  upon  such  impediments.  He  had 
now  put  everything  concerned  with  the  publication  into 
the  hands  of  Julius  Hare,  to  whom  he  was  as  yet  known 
only  through  his  brother  Francis,  but  who  eagerly  under- 
took and  loyally  discharged  the  task.  Hare,  then  a  tutor 
at  Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  persuaded  a  publisher  named 
Taylor,  with  whom  he  was  on  terms  of  personal  friend- 
ship, to  take  up  the  book ;  the  profits  or  losses,  if  any,  to 
be  shared  equally  between  author  and  publisher.  Present- 
ly there  arose  diflEerences  between  Taylor  and  Hare  about 
the  suppression  of  words  or  passages  which  the  former 
judged  exceptionable.  First  Wordsworth,  then  Southey, 
was  proposed  as  umpire  in  these  differences,  Southey  final- 
ly agreeing  to  undertake  the  office ;  but  even  against 
Southey  Taylor  adhered  to  some  of  his  objections.  All 
this  occasioned  considerable  delay.  In  the  meantime  the 
rumour  of  the  forthcoming  book  aroused  no  slight  degree 
of  expectation.  As  a  foretaste  of  its  contents,  the  critical 
dialogue  between  Southey  and  Porson  on  the  merits  of 
Wordsworth's  poetry  was  published  by  agreement  in  one 
of  the  monthly  reviews  in  1823.  The  best  judges  were 
interested  and  struck,  and  Wordsworth  himself  much  grat- 
ified. Landor's  original  intention  had  been  to  dedicate 
his  book  to  Wordsworth,  and  his  announcement  of  the 
fact  had  been  received  by  the  poet  with  the  utmost  pleas- 
ure. But  while  the  volumes  were  in  the  press  it  seemed 
to  Landor  that  some  of  his  expressions  against  those  in 
authority  were  stronger  than  could  be  pleasing  to  one  of 
Wordsworth's  opinions ;  so,  with  courteous  explanations, 
he  changed  his  purpose ;  and  when  the  book  at  last  ap- 
peared, in  1824,  its  two  volumes  were  dedicated  respec- 
tively, the  first  to  the  husband  of  his  wife's  sister,  Major- 


104  LANDOR.  [chap. 

General  Stopford ;  the  second  to  a  soldier  of  liberty,  Gen- 
eral Mina,  the  champion  of  the  popular  cause  in  Spain. 
In  the  course  of  a  preface  prefixed  to  the  first  volume 
Landor  describes  his  present  purposes  in  literature  as  fol- 
lows: "Should  health  and  peace  of  mind  remain  to  me,\ 
and  the  enjoyment  of  a  country  where,  if  there  are  none  to  K 
assist,  at  least  there  is  none  to  molest  me,  I  hope  to  leave 
behind  me  completed  the  great  object  of  my  studies,  an 
orderly  and  solid  work  in  history ;  and  I  cherish  the  per- 
suasion that  Posterity  will  not  confound  me  with  the 
Coxes  and  Foxes  of  the  age." 

In  the  two  volumes  thus  produced  and  prefaced,  dia- 
logues the  most  dissimilar  in  subject,  and  the  most  vari- 
ous in  the  personages  introduced,  are  brought  together 
without  system  or  connexion.  Lord  Brooke  and  Sir 
Philip  Sidney  discourse  on  letters  and  morality  beneath 
the  oaks  of  Penshurst.  Richard  I.  encounters  his  faithful 
Abbot  of  Boxley  on  the  road  by  Hagenau.  Southey  re- 
cites to  Porson  the  Laodamia  of  Wordsworth,  and  they 
criticize  its  beauties  and  shortcomings,  -^schines  and 
Phocion  discuss  the  character  of  Demosthenes  and  the 
prospects  of  Greece  on  one  page,  and  on  the  next  Queen 
Elizabeth  banters  Cecil  on  his  slight  esteem  for  poetry  and 
poets.  General  Kleber  opens  the  locket  and  the  letter 
taken  from  the  body  of  an  English  officer  killed  in  wan^ 
tonness  by  the  French  during  the  war  in  Egypt.  Demos- 
thenes discusses  policy  and  oratory  with  his  teacher  Eu- 
bulides,  and  Buonaparte  receives  the  adulations  of  the 
Senate  through  its  president.  Milton  converses  with  An- 
drew Marvel  on  the  forms  and  varieties  of  comedy  and 
tragedy,  and  Washington  with  Franklin  on  the  causes  and 
conduct  of  the  war  between  the  American  colonies  and 
the  mother  country,  and  on  the  political  prorpects  of  each 


v.]  THE  IMAGINARY  CONVERSATIONS.  105 

in  the  future.  Roger  Ascham  warns  his  lovely  pupil,  Lady 
Jane  Grey,  of  the  perils  that  await  her  after  her  marriage. 
The  wisdom  of  Bacon  and  of  Hooker  are  exhibited  togeth- 
er, and  the  worldliness  of  the  one  set  in  contrast  to  the 
piety  of  the  other.  The  extravagances  of  despotism  and 
of  superstition  are  set  forth  in  a  vein  of  Aristophanic  cari- 
cature in  a  conversation  of  Louis  XIV.  with  his  confessor. 
Pericles  and  Sophocles  walk  and  talk  amid  the  new-limned 
and  new-carven  glories  of  the  Acropolis.  The  prospects 
of  revolutionary  Spain  and  revolutionary  Greece,  and  the 
duties  of  the  European  powers  to  both,  are  discussed  in 
a  dialogue  of  General  Lacy  with  the  Cura  Merino,  and 
another  of  Prince  Mavrocordato  with  Colocotroni.  The 
Scotch  philosopher  and  the  Scotch  poet,  Hume  and  Home, 
converse  of  their  own  problematic  relationship,  of  ortho- 
doxy, and  of  toleration.  Henry  VHL  intrudes  suddenly 
upon  his  cast-off  wife,  Anne  Boleyn,  in  the  days  just  be- 
fore her  execution.  Cicero  moralizes  with  his  brother 
Quinctus  concerning  life,  death,  friendship,  and  glory,  on 
the  eve  of  his  last  birthday.  The  seditious  Tooke  wins 
from  the  Tory  Johnson  a  kindly  hearing  for  his  views  on 
English  language  and  orthography — views  which  in  fact 
are  Landor's  own,  and  the  effect  of  which  makes  itself 
practicall}'  perceived  in  the  spelling  both  of  this  and  of  his 
other  published  writings,  earlier  and  later.  In  his  own 
person  Landor  appears  as  interlocutor  in  two  dialogues; 
one  principally  on  architecture  and  gardening,  held  with 
his  landlord  at  Genoa ;  the  other  on  poetry,  criticism,  and 
Boileau  with  the  French  translator  of  Milton,  the  Abbe 
Delille.  Interspersed  are  supplementary  notes  and  dis- 
sertations in  Landor's  customary  vein  of  mingled  whim 
and  wisdom,  of  ardent  enthusiasm  and  lofty  scorn,  all  con- 
veyed in  the  same  dignified,  sedate,  authoritative  tones. 
H 


106  LANDOR.  [chap. 

Finally,  "  as  a  voluntary  to  close  the  work,"  he  appends 
the  poem  on  the  Greek  and  Italian  revolutions  of  which 
we  have  quoted  a  part  above. 

The  book  made  when  it  appeared  no  great  impression 
on  the  popular  mind,  but  upon  that  of  students  and  lovers 
of  high  literature  one  as  strong,  at  least,  as  Landor's  friends 
expected.  He  could  no  longer  be  charged  with  cultivat- 
ing private  renown  among  a  select  band  of  admirers.  He 
had  challenged  the  general  verdict  over  an  extensive  field 
of  thought  and  imagination.  The  verdict  of  the  critics, 
in  that  age  of  carping  and  cudgelling  literary  partisanship, 
could  not  be  expected  to  be  unanimous,  least  of  all  in  the 
case  of  a  writer  of  judgments  so  decisive  and  opinions  so 
untempered  as  Landor.  Jeffrey  only  allowed  Hazlitt  to 
notice  the  book  in  the  Edinburgh  Review  when  he  had 
ascertained  that  the  enthusiastic  opinion  which  Hazlitt  had 
formed  of  Landor's  powers  of  mind  and  style,  and  of  the 
beauty  of  particular  dialogues,  was  qualified  by  strong  dis- 
approval of  many  of  his  opinions,  especially  of  his  opin- 
ions on  Buonaparte ;  and  even  then  Jeffrey  cut  and  modi- 
fied his  contributor's  work,  so  that  the  article  as  it  appear- 
ed was  of  a  very  mixed  character.  The  Quarterly,  dL?>  a 
matter  of  course,  was  hostile ;  but  the  sting  had  been 
taken  out  of  Quarterly  hostility  by  a  dexterous  stroke  of 
friendship  on  the  part  of  Julius  Hare.  This  was  a  criti- 
cism which  Hare  published  in  the  London  Review  just  be- 
fore the  appearance  of  the  Quarterly,  and  in  which  he  an- 
ticipated all  the  reprehensions  of  the  Tory  oracle,  putting 
them  into  the  mouth  of  an  imaginary  interlocutor  whom 
he  calls  Hargreaves,  and  represents  as  a  cynical,  scribbling 
barrister,  and  himself  traversing  and  over-riding  them. 
From  Southey  and  Wordsworth  there  came,  written  on  a 
single  sheet,  a  letter  of  thanks  and  praise  which  Landor 


v.]  THE  IMAGINARY  CONVERSATIONS.  10^ 

greatly  cherislied.  It  was  felt  and  said,  among  those  who 
have  the  right  to  speak  for  futurity,  that  a  new  classic  had 
arisen.  One  thing,  at  any  rate,  there  was  no  gainsaying, . 
and  that  was  the  excellence  of  Landor's  English,  the 
strength,  dignity,  and  harmony  of  his  prose  style,  qualities 
in  which  he  was  obviously  without  a  living  rival.  For  the 
first  time  Landor  was  able  to  anticipate  a  certain  measure 
of  profit  from  his  work.  Both  to  profit  and  popularity, 
indeed,  he  was  aocustomed  to  express  an  indifference  which 
was  quite  sincere ;  but  the  encouragement  of  his  peers 
added  a  real  zest  to  the  continuance  of  his  labours.  Al- 
most before  the  first  edition  had  appeared,  he  had  pre- 
pared materials  for  its  expansion  in  a  second,  to  consist  of 
three  volumes  instead  of  two.  He  kept  forwarding  cor- 
rections and  insertions  for  the  original  dialogues,  the  latter 
including  some  of  the  best  matter  which  they  contain  in 
the  form  which  we  now  possess.  Thus  to  the  dialogue  of 
the  Ciceros  he  added  the  allegory  of  Truth,  the  most  per- 
fect, I  think,  next  to  one  (and  that  also  is  by  Landor),  in 
the  English  language ;  to  that  of  Lacy  and  Merino,  the 
grandest  of  all  his  outbursts  concerning  the  principles  of 
English  policy  abroad ;  and  even  to  the  brief,  high-pitched, 
and  high-wrought  dialogues  of  Lady  Jane  Grey  and  Anne 
Boleyn,  a  page  or  two  each.  To  the  passage  on  Mr. 
George  Nelly  the  death  of  Byron,  which  had  happened 
about  the  time  of  its  original  publication,  induces  Landor 
to  append  this  noble  palinode  : 

"  If,  before  the  dialogue  was  printed,  he  had  performed  those  ser- 
vices to  Greece  which  will  render  his  name  illustrious  to  eternity, 
those  by  which  he  merited  such  funereal  honours  as,  in  the  parsimo- 
ny of  praise,  knowing  its  value  in  republics,  she  hardly  would  have 
decreed  to  the  most  deserving  of  her  heroes ;  if,  I  repeat  it,  he  had 
performed  those  services,  the  performance  of  which  I  envy  him  from 
31 


108  LANDOR.  [chap. 

my  soul,  and  as  much  as  any  other  does  the  gifts  of  heaven  he  threw 
away  so  carelessly,  never  would  I,  from  whatever  provocation,  have 
written  a  syllable  against  him.  I  had  avoided  him ;  I  had  slighted 
him ;  he  knew  it.  He  did  not  love  me ;  he  could  not.  While  he 
spoke  or  wrote  against  me,  I  said  nothing  in  print  or  conversation ; 
the  taciturnity  of  pride  gave  way  to  other  feelings  when  my  friends, 
men  so  much  better  and  (let  the  sincerity  oL  the  expression  be  ques- 
tioned by  those  who  are  unacquainted  with  us)  so  much  dearer,  so 
much  oftener  in  my  thoughts,  were  assailed  by  him  too  intemper- 
ately." 

Landor's  materials  for  his  third  vohime  comprised  no  less 
than  twenty  dialogues,  including  one  very  long,  rambling, 
and  heterogeneous,  between  the  Due  de  Kichelieu,  a  vulgar 
Irish  woman  of  title,  a  general,  also  Irish,  and  a  virtuous 
English  schoolmaster  turned  sailor.  With  this  were  as- 
sociated some  of  Landor's  best  brief  dialogues  of  character 
and  passion,  notably  the  Roman  two  of  Marcellus  with 
Hannibal  and  Tiberius  with  Vipsania ;  several  of  his  mon- 
umental satires  against  tyranny  and  superstition,  including 
the  terrible  dialogue  of  Peter  the  Great  with  his  son  Alex- 
is, and  the  playful  one  of  Bossuet  and  the  Duchesse  de 
Fontanges;  a  discussion  between  Rousseau  and  Males- 
herbes,  which  is  one  of  the  best  of  the  modern  meditative 
class ;  a  visit  of  Joseph  Scaliger  to  Montaigne,  the  latter  a 
personage  for  whom  Landor  entertained  a  peculiar  sympa- 
thy and  admiration ;  and  among  the  ancients  a  remon- 
strance of  the  poet  Anacreon  with  the  tyrant  Polycrates,  a 
contrast  of  the  true  stoic  Epictetus  with  the  false  stoic 
Seneca,  and  a  second  conversation  of  Demosthenes  and 
Eubulides.  Himself  Landor  introduced  as  conversing 
with  an  English  and  a  Florentine  visitor  on  the  death  and 
the  virtues  of  the  Grand  Duke  Ferdinand  of  Tuscany,  on 
politics  and  poetry,  and  especially  on  the  fates  and  genius 
of  Keats  and  Shelley. 


T.]  THE  IMAGINARY  CONVERSATIONS.  109 

"  If  anything  could  engage  me  to  visit  Rome  again,  to  endure  the 
sight  of  her  scarred  and  awful  ruins,  telling  their  stories  on  the 
ground  in  the  midst  of  bell-ringers  and  pantomimes ;  if  I  could  let 
charnel-houses  and  opera-houses,  consuls  and  popes,  tribunes  and  car- 
dinals, senatorial  orators  and  preaching  friars  clash  in  my  mind,  it 
would  be  that  I  might  afterwards  spend  an  hour  in  solitude,  where 
the  pyramid  of  Cestius  stands  against  the  wall,  and  points  to  the 
humbler  tombs  of  Keats  and  Shelley. 

"  Keats,  in  his  Ertdymion^  is  richer  in  imagery  than  either  [Chaucer 
or  Burns] :  and  there  are  passages  in  which  no  poet  has  arrived  at 
the  same  excellence  on  the  same  ground.  Time  alone  was  wanting 
to  complete  a  poet,  who  already  far  surpassed  all  his  contemporaries 
in  this  country  in  the  poet's  most  noble  attributes.  .  .  .  We  will  now 
return  to  Shelley.  Innocent  and  careless  as  a  boy,  he  possessed  all 
the  delicate  feelings  of  a  gentleman,  all  the  discrimination  of  a  schol- 
ar, and  united,  in  just  degrees,  the  ardour  of  the  poet  with  the  pa- 
tience and  forbearance  of  the  philosopher.  His  generosity  and  char- 
ity went  far  beyond  those  of  any  man  (I  believe)  at  present  in  exist- 
ence. He  was  never  known  to  speak  evil  of  an  enemy,  unless  that 
enemy  had  done  some  grievous  injustice  to  another :  and  he  divided 
his  income  of  only  one  thousand  pounds  with  the  fallen  and  afflicted." 

After  expressing  his  deep  regret  at  the  misunderstanding 
which  had  kept  them  strangers,  Landor  concludes : 

"As  to  what  remains  of  him,  now  life  is  over,  he  occupies  the  third 
place  among  the  poets  of  the  present  age,  and  is  incomparably  the 
most  elegant,  graceful,  and  harmonious  of  the  prose  writers." 

Landor's  implied  order  among  the  poets  in  the  above 
words  is,  strange  as  it  may  seem,  Southey,  Wordsworth, 
Shelley.  Republishing  the  conversation  twenty  years  late?' 
he  varies  the  last  words  as  follows : 

"  He  occupies,  if  not  the  highest,  almost  the  highest,  place  among 
our  poets  of  the  present  age ;  no  humble  station  ;  and  is  among  the 
Biost  elegant,  graceful,  and  harmonious  of  the  prose  writers." 


110  LANDOR.  [chap. 

Witli  reference  to  his  own  position  among  his  fellow- 
writers,  Landor  is  as  totally  and  cordially  free  from  jeal- 
ousy as  it  is  possible  for  a  man  to  be.  At  the  same  time 
he  has  no  doubts ;  and  the  text  or  notes  of  these  personal 
dialogues  occasionally  contain  a  remark  in  the  following 
stately  key,  "  What  I  write  is  not  written  on  slate,  and  no 
finger,  not  of  Time  himself,  who  dips  it  in  the  clouds  of 
years,  can  efface  it ;"  and  occasionally  a  derisive  challenge 
to  his  reviewers — let  the  sturdiest  of  them  take  the  ten 
worst  of  his  dialogues,  "  and  if  he  equals  them  in  ten  years  [■ 
I  will  give  him  a  hot  wheaten  roll  and  a  pint  of  brown 
stout  for  breakfast." 

Landor  panted  for  the  immediate  publication  of  his  new 
edition,  but  was  again  foiled  by  his  own  impetuosity. 
Some  want  of  tact  in  a  letter  of  Taylor's,  some  slight  de 
lays  of  payment  and  correspondence  on  his  part,  together 
with  the  irritation  Landor  had  not  unnaturally  felt  under 
his  timorous  censorship,  led  to  an  outbreak  which  made 
all  future  relations  between  them  impossible.  Landor's 
annoyance  and  his  suspicions  having  been  inflamed  in  the 
course  of  conversation  with  Hazlitt  and  Leigh  Hunt,  his 
imagination  swiftly  added  fuel  to  the  fire,  and  he  presently 
exploded,  writing  to  accuse  Taylor  of  every  kind  of  mis- 
conduct, and  proclaiming  every  kind  of  desperate  resolu- 
tion in  consequence :  "  His  first  villainy  instigated  me  to 
throw  my  fourth  volume,  in  its  imperfect  state,  into  the 
fire,  and  has  cost  me  nine-tenths  of  my  fame  as  a  writer. 
His  next  villainy  will  entail  perhaps  a  chancery  suit  on  my 
children — for  at  its  commencement  I  blow  my  brains  out. 
This  cures  me  for  ever,  if  I  live,  of  writing  what  could  be 
published  ;  and  I  will  take  good  care  that  my  son  shall  not 
suffer  in  the  same  way.  Not  a  line  of  any  kind  will  I 
leave  behind  me.     My  children  shall  be  carefully  warned 


T.]  THE  IMAGINARY  CONVERSATIONS.  Ill 

against  literature."  Was  ever  ancient  Roman  so  forgetful 
of  himself?  Was  ever  overgrown  schoolboy  so  incorrigi- 
ble? 

Landor's  "for  ever"  rarely  lasted  more  than  a  few 
weeks,  and  it  is  to  his  credit  that  when  Julius  Hare  replied 
to  all  this  with  a  perfectly  manly  and  straightforward  letter 
of  remonstrance,  justifying  his  friend  Taylor  in  all  but  a 
few  unimportant  particulars,  Landor  received  the  rebuke 
in  silence,  and  continued  to  entrust  to  Hare  the  farther  ar- 
rangements concerning  his  book.  The  materials  intended 
for  his  fourth  volume  he  had,  as  we  have  just  read,  de- 
stroyed. But  within  a  few  months  more  he  had  produced 
new  dialogues  enough  not  only  for  one,  but  for  two  addi- 
tional volumes,  and  in  the  meantime  another  publisher  had 
been  found  in  the  person  of  Colburn,  Landor's  share  of 
the  profits  on  his  first  edition  had  been  a  hundred  and  sev- 
enty pounds  odd.  For  the  second  edition  he  received  in 
advance  two  hundred  pounds.  Its  first  two  volumes  ap- 
peared in  1826;  the  third,  the  new  volume,  dedicated  to 
Bolivar,  not  until  1828,  and  these  three  volumes  were  now 
reerarded  as  constituting  the  "first  series"  of  the  work. 
Some  fresh  slight  disagreements  having  arisen,  the  fourth 
and  fifth  volumes,  comprising  the  "  second  series,"  were 
entrusted  to  yet  another  publisher,  Duncan,  and  appeared 
in  1829.  These  two  new  volumes  contain  between  them 
twenty-seven  more  dialogues  of  the  old  diversified  charac- 
ter. That  of  LucuUus  and  Csesar  is  the  loftiest,  most 
thoughtful,  and  urbane,  next  to  that  of  the  two  Ciceros, 
among  the  more  tranquil  of  Landor's  Roman  dialogues. 
The  conversation  of  Diogenes  and  Plato,  allowing  for  the 
peculiar  view  which  Landor  had  formed  of  Plato's  charac- 
ter and  genius,  is  at  once  the  most  pungent  and  the  most 
majestic  of  the  Greek.     In  the  dialogue  of  Metellus  and 


112  LANDOR.  [chap. 

Marius  at  the  walls  of  Numantia,  Landor  embodies  with 
masterly  imagination  the  inexorable  spirit  of  Roman  coa- 
quest ;  in  that  of  Leof ric  and  Godiva  the  charm  of  bridal 
tenderness  and  the  invincibility  of  womanly  compassion  • 
in  that  of  Lady  Lisle  and  Lady  Elizabeth  Gaunt,  con- 
demned to  death  during  the  bloody  assize  for  sheltering 
the  partisans  of  Monmouth,  the  constancy  of  martyrdom 
and  the  divine  persistence  of  more  than  Christian  forgive- 
ness. Landor's  own  favourite  conversation  of  all  was  that 
in  which  the  philosopher  Epicurus  instructs  at  once  in  wis- 
dom and  in  dalliance  his  girl-pupils  Leontion  and  Ternissa. 
A  scarcely  less  ideal  charm  is  breathed  by  Landor  over  the 
relations  of  his  own  contemporary  Trelawny  with  the 
daughter  of  the  Klepht  leader  Odysseus,  in  the  introduc- 
tion of  a  dialogue  which  turns  afterwards  on  the  discussion 
of  European,  and  especially  of  Greek,  politics.  In  a  short 
scene  between  Peleus  and  Thetis  he  unites  with  the  full 
charm  of  Hellenic  mythology  the  full  vividness  of  human 
passion.  Satirical  conversations  between  the  French  min- 
isters Villele  and  Corbiere,  the  Engiish  Pitt  and  Canning, 
and  the  Portuguese  Prince  Miguel  and  his  mother,  give 
vent  mot-e  or  less  felicitously  to  his  illimitable  contempt 
fo'  the  ministers  and  ruling  families  of  modern  states. 

Besides  the  contents  of  these  five  volumes,  written  and 
published  between  the  years  1821  and  1829,  and  contain- 
ing in  all  about  eighty  Conversations,  Landor  had  before 
the  latter  date  written  some  twenty  more,  which  he  in- 
tended for  publication  in  a  sixth.  But  from  one  reason 
and  another  this  sixth  volume  never  appeared,  and  the  ma- 
terials which  should  have  composed  it  were  for  the  most 
part  only  made  public  in  the  collected  edition  of  Landor's 
writings  issued  in  1846.  Counting  these,  and  the  increase 
in  the  number  of  the  original  dialogues  effected  by  divid- 


T.]  THE  IMAGINARY  CONVERSATIONS.  113 

ing  some  of  them  into  two,  and  adding  those  which  he 
wrote  afterwards  at  intervals  until  the  year  of  his  death, 
the  total  number  of  Imaginary  Conversations  left  by  Lan- 
dor  amounts  to  just  short  of  a  hundred  and  fifty. 

Those  written  in  the  eight  years  now  under  review  in- 
clude, therefore,  about  two-thirds  of  the  whole.  We  have 
seen  with  what  ardour  and  facility,  and  with  what  a  mis- 
cellaneous selection  of  speakers  and  of  topics,  they  were 
produced.  Their  range  extends  over  the  greater  part  of 
life,  literature,  and  history.  Landor  himself,  and  his  edi- 
tors after  him,  devised  in  the  sequel  various  modes  of 
grouping  and  classifying  them ;  but  none  of  these  classifi- 
cations are  satisfactory.  Conversations  of  the  Greeks  and 
Romans  form,  indeed,  one  distinct  historical  division,  but 
not  a  division  on  which  it  is  desirable  to  insist.  It  has 
often  been  said  of  Landor  that  he  wrote  of  the  Greeks 
more  like  a  Greek,  and  of  the  Romans  more  like  a  Roman, 
than  any  other  modern,  and  the  saying  in  my  judgment  is 
true.  But  his  treatment  of  other  themes  is  not  different 
in  kind  from  his  treatment  of  these,  and  he  has  not  been 
better  inspired  by  the  romance  and  the  example  of  antiq- 
uity than  by  the  charm  of  Italy  or  the  glory  of  England. 
The  original  title  of  the  two  first  volumes,  Imaginary 
Conversations  of  Literary  Men  and  Statesmen,  by  no 
means  covered  the  whole  of  their  contents ;  and  the  edi- 
torial divisions  afterwards  established  by  Mr.  Forster,  viz., 
Greeks  and  Romans^  Soldiers  and  Statesmen,  Literary 
Men,  Famous  Women,  and  Miscellaneous,  cross  and  over- 
lap each  other  in  many  directions.  To  my  mind  the  only 
vital  and  satisfactory  division  between  one  class  and  an- 
other of  Landor's  prose  conversations  is  that  between  the 
dramatic  and  the  non- dramatic;  the  words  are  inexact, 
and  the  distinction  is  far  from  being  sharp  or  absolute ; 
6 


114  LANDOR.  [chap. 

but  what  I  mean  is  this,  that  some  of  the  compositions  in 
question  are  full  of  action,  character,  and  passion,  and 
those  I  call  the  dramatic  group ;  in  others  there  is  little 
action,  and  character  and  passion  are  replaced  by  disqui- 
sition and  reflection,  and  those  I  call  by  contrast  the  non- 
dramatic.  In  the  former  class  Landor  is  in  each  case 
taken  up  with  the  creative  task  of  realizing  a  heroic  or 
pathetic  situation,  and  keeps  himself  entirely  in  the  back- 
ground. In  the  latter  class  his  energetic  personality  is 
apt  to  impose  itself  upon  his  speakers,  who  are  often  little 
more  than  masks  behind  which  he  retires  in  order  to  utter 
his  own  thoughts  and  opinions  with  the  greater  conven- 
ience and  variety. 

The  dramatic  conversations  are  mostly  brief,  and  range 
over  almost  all  periods  of  time.  Central  examples  of  the 
class  are,  from  Roman  antiquity,  the  dialogues  of  Marcel- 
lus  and  Hannibal,  and  of  Tiberius  and  Vipsania ;  from  the 
history  or  historic  legend  of  England,  those  of  Leofric  and 
Godiva,  of  John  of  Gaunt  and  Joanna  of  Kent,  of  Henry 
VIII.  and  Anne  Boleyn,  and  of  Lady  Lisle  and  Lady  Eliz- 
abeth Gaunt ;  from  the  history  of  France,  those  of  Joan 
of  Arc  and  Agnes  Sorel,  and  of  Bossuet  and  the  Duchesse 
de  Fontanges;  from  that  of  Italy,  the  interviews  of  Dante 
with  Beatrice,  and  of  Leonora  di  Este  with  Father  Pani- 
garola.  In  these  and  similar  cases  Landor  merely  takes  a 
motive  suggested  by  history,  being  more  apt  to  avoid  than 
to  make  use  of  any  actually  recorded  incident,  and  pre- 
ferring to  call  up,  not  any  scene  which  to  our  positive 
knowledge  ever  was,  but  only  such  a  scene  as  might  have 
been,  enacted,  the  characters  and  circumstances  being 
given.  It  is,  therefore,  from  the  imaginative  and  not  from 
the  literal  point  of  view  that  his  work  is  to  be  approach- 
ed.    His  endeavour  is  to  embody  the  spirit  of  historical 


v.]  THE  IMAGINARY  CONVERSATIONS.  115 

epochs  in  scenes  of  which  the  actions  and  the  emotions 
shall  be  at  the  same  time  new  and  just.  In  many  in- 
stances his  success  is  complete.  The  spirit,  as  I  have  al- 
ready said,  of  Roman  conquest  stands  typically  fixed  in  a 
dialogue  like  that  of  Marius  and  Metellus;  so  does  the 
spirit  of  Norman  chivalry  in  one  like  that  of  Tancredi  and 
Constantia;  and  of  English  honour  in  that  of  John  of 
Gaunt  and  the  Queen.  In  the  actual  dramatic  conduct  of 
the  scenes  Landor,  in  these  short  compositions,  shows  a 
creative  power  and  insight  equal  to  that  of  the  very  gTeat- 
est  masters.  Uniting  the  extreme  of  force  to  the  extreme 
of  tenderness,  he  pursues  and  seizes  with  convincing  mas- 
tery the  subtlest  movements  of  impassioned  feeling.  Out 
of  the  nobility  and  tenderness  of  his  own  heart  he  imag- 
ines heights  and  delicacies  of  those  qualities  unmatched, 
as  I  cannot  but  think,  by  any  English  writer  except  Shak- 
speare.  Pitching  the  emotions  of  his  actors  at  an  ideal 
height,  his  aim,  we  must  farther  remember,  is  to  fix  and 
embody  them  in  an  ideal  cast  of  language ;  language  of  a 
perfection  and  a  precision  which  no  stress  of  feeling  is  al- 
lowed to  impair  or  discompose.  The  emotion,  as  thus  em- 
bodied in  words  as  it  were  of  marble,  Landor  leaves  always 
as  "  naked  "  as  possible,  as  much  divested  of  accident  and 
superfluity.  Explanations  and  stage  directions  of  all  sorts 
the  reader  has  to  supply  for  himself,  the  author  furnishing 
nothing  of  that  nature  except  what  is  to  be  inferred  from 
the  bare  utterances  of  his  speakers.  At  the  same  time 
we  are  aware  that  he  has  himself  realized  the  action  of 
every  scene  with  perfect  clearness.  These  high  -  strung 
dramatic  dialogues  used  to  cost  Landor  in  the  composi- 
tion both  throes  and  tears.  As  in  the  writing  of  Count 
Julian  long  ago,  so  now  in  that  of  Tiberius  and  Vipsania, 
he  tells  us  how  he  watched  and  wept  over  his  work  by 


116  LANDOR.  [chap. 

night,  and  how  every  feature  and  gesture  of  his  person- 
ages stood  visibly  present  before  his  mind's  eye.  But  as 
in  Count  Julian,  so  now,  he  fails  occasionally  to  take  the 
reader  with  him.  Want  of  instinctive  sympathy  with  his 
reader  is  the  weak  point  of  Landor's  lofty  art,  and  in 
these  dialogues  he  is  so  perfectly  sure  of  his  own  way  that 
he  sometimes  forgets  to  put  into  our  hands  the  clue  which 
we  need  in  order  to  follow  him.  But  usually  nothing 
more  is  necessary  than  a  little  attention,  a  little  deliberate- 
ness  in  reading — and  work  so  full  and  rich  is  to  be  read 
attentively  and  deliberately  if  at  all — in  order  to  make  all 
clear.  The  speeches  as  they  succeed  one  another  then  be- 
come to  us  at  the  same  time  both  monuments  of  the  emo- 
tions of  the  actors  and  landmarks  indicating  the  crisis 
which  their  actions  have  reached;  and  we  read  between 
the  lines  how  the  heart-stricken  Thetis  has  sunk  through 
the  embrace  of  Peleus ;  how  the  maidens  in  the  house  of 
Xanthus  shrank  one  behind  another  in  inquisitive  awe  at 
the  beauty  of  Rhodope,  the  stranger  slave  from  Phrygia ; 
how  Marius  adventures  and  returns  over  blood  and  ashes 
within  the  walls  of  the  beleaguered  city  of  Numantia; 
how  Zenobia  is  hurled  by  her  despairing  Rhadaraistus  into 
the  eddies  of  the  Araxes ;  how  Godiva  descends  from  her 
palfrey  to  kneel  and  pray  when  Leofric  has  sworn  his 
cruel  oath ;  how  Dante  for  the  last  time  rests  his  fevered 
head  upon  the  maiden  bosom  of  Beatrice ;  how  Anne 
Boleyn  swoons  at  the  unlooked-for  entrance  of  her  lord; 
or  how  the  palace  dog  is  heard  lapping  as  it  falls  the  blood 
of  the  murdered  Czar.  Or  sometimes  the  incidents  are 
of  another  kind,  and  we  realize  with  amusement  how  the 
venerable  Bossuet  bustles  to  pick  up  his  ring  lest  the 
child-mistress  of  Louis  XIV.  should  stoop  for  it ;  or  how 
that  monarch  himself  lets  slip  by  inadvertence  into  his 


v.]  THE  IMAGINARY  CONVERSATIONS.  in 

breeches  the  strip  of  silk  which  the  same  prelate  and  con- 
fessor has  enjoined  him  to  place  next  his  skin  by  way  of 
penance.  For  among  the  dialogues  of  this  dramatic  group 
some  are  comic,  or  at  least  satiric,  branding  the  delin- 
quencies of  priests  and  kings  in  a  vein  of  Aristophanic  or 
Rabelaisian  exaggeration.  These,  however,  are  seldom 
among  Landor's  best  work,  marble  being  not  the  most 
suitable  material  for  caricature,  nor  weight  and  polish  its 
most  appropriate  excellencies.  In  general  it  may  be  truly 
said  of  Landor  that  he  rises  or  falls  according  to  the  nature 
of  his  subject,  and  is  at  his  best  only  in  the  highest  things. 
Especially  is  this  true  in  his  treatment  of  women.  Both 
in  the  physical  and  the  spiritual,  Landor's  feeling  for  the 
feminine  is  as  strong  as  it  is  exquisite ;  there  is  no  writer, 
Shakspeare  alone  once  more  excepted,  who  surpasses  him 
in  it.  Hardly  Perdita  or  Imogen  themselves  are  made 
more  beautiful  to  us  by  words  than  Landor's  maiden  image 
of  Hope — "  her  countenance  was  tinged  with  so  delicate  a 
colour  that  it  appeared  an  effluence  of  an  irradiated  cloud 
passing  over  us  in  the  heavens ;"  or  than  his  Greek  Thelym- 
nia  in  her  crown  of  myrtle — "  there  was  something  in  the 
tint  of  the  tender  sprays  resembling  that  of  the  hair  they 
encircled ;  the  blossoms  too  were  white  as  her  forehead." 
Hardly  Imogen  again,  hardly  Cordelia,  hardly  Desdemona, 
are  more  nobly  realized  types  of  constancy  and  sweetness, 
of  womanly  heroism  and  womanly  resignation,  than  are 
Landor's  Joan  of  Arc  or  his  Anne  Boleyn  during  the  brief 
scenes  in  which  they  are  brought  before  us.  But  there  is 
one  weak  point  in  Landor's  dealing  with  women  which 
must  not  be  overlooked.  When  he  comes  down  from 
these  heights,  and  deals  with  the  every-day  timidities  cf 
young  love,  and  simplicities  of  girlish  feeling,  he  some- 
times, it  must  be  confessed-,  goes  altogether  astray,  and 


118  LANDOB.  [chap. 

strikes  the  note  of  false  innocence  and  flirting  "arch- 
ness." His  young  women,  inchiding  the  Greek,  are  on 
these  occasions  apt  to  say  "audacious!"  "you  must  be 
a  very  bold  man!"  "put  me  down!"  and  generally  to 
comport  themselves  in  a  manner  giggly,  missish,  and  dis- 
concerting. 

To  give  the  reader  a  just  idea  of  Landor's  manner  in 
this  class  of  his  Conversations,  it  would  be  desirable  to  set 
before  him  at  least  two  examples,  one  to  illustrate  the  ex- 
treme of  his  strength,  the  other  of  his  delicacy,  in  dramatic 
imagination.  Space  failing  for  this,  let  us  detach  an  ex- 
ample of  an  intermediate  kind  from  a  dialogue  to  which 
allusion  has  several  times  been  made  already,  that  of  Leofric 
and  Oodiva,  beginning  at  the  point  where  the  petitions  of 
the  tender-hearted  bride  begin  to  overbear  her  lord's  ob- 
stinate resentment  against  his  people : 

'^Leofric.  We  must  hold  solemn  festivals. 

Godiva.  We  must  indeed. 

Leofric.  Well  then! 

Godiva.  Is  the  clamorousness  that  succeeds  the  death  of  God'e 
dumb  creatures,  are  crowded  halls,  are  slaughtered  cattle,  festivals  ? 
Are  maddening  songs  and  giddy  dances,  and  hireling  praises  from 
party-coloured  coats?  Can  the  voice  of  a  minstrel  tell  us  better 
things  of  ourselves  than  our  own  internal  one  might  tell  us  ?  or  can 
his  breath  make  our  breath  softer  in  sleep  ?  0  my  beloved !  let 
everything  be  a  joyance  to  us ;  it  will,  if  we  will.  Sad  is  the  day, 
and  worse  must  follow,  when  we  hear  the  blackbird  in  the  garden 
and  do  not  throb  with  joy.  But  Leofric,  the  high  festival  is  strewn 
by  the  servant  of  God  upon  the  heart  of  man.  It  is  gladness,  it  is 
thanksgiving,  it  is  the  orphan,  the  starveling  prest  to  the  bosom,  and 
bidden  as  its  first  commandment  to  remember  its  benefactor.  We 
will  hold  this  festival ;  the  guests  are  ready :  we  may  keep  it  up  for 
weeks  and  months  and  years  together,  and  always  be  the  happier 
and  the  richer  for  it.  The  beverage  of  this  feast,  0  Leofric,  is 
sweeter  than  bee  or  flower  or  vine  can  give  us:  it  flows  from  heaven; 


v.]  THE  IMAGINARY  CONVERSATIONS.  119 

and  in  heaven  will  it  again  be  poured  out  abundantly  to  bim  who 
pours  it  out  here  abundantly. 

Leofric.  Thou  art  wild. 

Godiva.  I  have  indeed  lost  myself;  the  words  are  not  mine:  I 
only  feel  and  utter  them.  Some  Power,  some  good,  kind  Power  melts 
me  (body  and  soul  and  voice)  into  tenderness  and  love.  0  my  hus- 
band, we  must  obey  it.  Look  upon  me !  look  upon  me !  lift  again 
your  sweet  eyes  from  the  ground  !  I  will  not  cease  to  supplicate ; 
I  dare  not. 

Leofric.  We  will  think  upon  it. 

Godiva.  0  never  say  that  word !  those  who  utter  it  are  false  men. 
What !  think  upon  goodness  when  you  can  be  good !  Let  not  their 
infants  cry  for  food  1  the  mother  of  our  blessed  Lord  will  hear  them ; 
us  never  afterward. 

Leofric.  Here  comes  the  bishop:  we  are  now  but  one  mile  from 
the  walls.  Why  dismountest  thou  ?  no  bishop  can  expect  it.  Godiva, 
my  honour  and  rank  among  men  are  humbled  by  this  :  Earl  Godwin 
will  hear  of  it :  up  !  up !  the  bishop  hath  seen  it :  he  urgeth  his  horse 
onward :  dost  thou  not  hear  him  now  upon  the  solid  turf  behind 
thee? 

Godiva.  Never,  no,  never  will  I  rise,  0  Leofric,  until  you  remit  this 
most  impious  tax,  this  tax  on  hard  labour,  on  hard  life. 

Leofric.  Turn  round :  look  how  the  fat  nag  canters,  as  to  the  tune 
of  a  sinner's  psalm,  slow  and  hard-breathing.  .  .  .  What  reason  or 
right  can  the  people  have  to  complain  while  their  bishop's  steed  is  so 
sleek  and  well  caparisoned  ?  Inclination  to  change,  desire  to  abolish 
old  usages.  .  .  .  Rise,  up  for  shame  !  they  shall  smart  for  it,  idlers. 
Sir  bishop,  I  must  blush  for  my  young  bride. 

Godiva.  My  husband,  my  husband  !  will  you  pardon  the  city  ? 

Leofric.  0,  sir  bishop !  I  could  not  think  you  would  have  seen 
her  in  this  plight.  Will  I  pardon  ?  yea,  Godiva,  by  the  holy  rood, 
will  I  pardon  the  city  when  thou  ridest  naked  at  noontide  through 
the  streets. 

Godiva.  0  my  dear,  cruel  Leofric,  where  is  the  heart  you  gave 
me  ?     It  was  not  so  !     Can  mine  have  hardened  it  ? 

Bishop.  Earl,  thou  abashest  thy  spouse;  she  turneth  pale  and 
weepeth.     Lady  Godiva,  peace  be  with  thee. 

Godiva.  Thanks,  holy  man !  peace  will  be  with  me  when  peace 
is  wkh  your  city.     Did  you  hear  my  lord's  hard  word  ? 


120  LANDOR.  ,  [chap 

Bishop.  I  did,  lady. 

Oodiva.  Will  you  remember  it,  and  pray  against  it  ? 

Bishop.  Wilt  thou  forget  it  ? 

Godiva.  I  am  not  offended. 

Bishop.  Angel  of  peace  and  purity ! 

Oodiva.  But  treasure  it  up  in  your  heart.  Deem  it  an  incense ; 
good  only  when  it  is  consumed  and  spent,  ascending  with  prayer  and 
sacrifice.     And  now  what  was  it  ? 

Bishop.  Christ  save  us  !  that  he  will  pardon  the  city  when  thou 
ridest  naked  through  the  streets  at  noon. 

Godiva.  Did  he  not  swear  an  oath  ? 

Bishop.  He  sware  by  the  holy  rood. 

Oodiva.  My  Redeemer  !  thou  hast  heard  it !  save  the  city ! 

Leofric.  We  are  upon  the  beginning  of  the  pavement :  these  are 
the  suburbs :  let  us  think  of  feasting :  we  may  pray  afterward :  to- 
morrow we  shall  rest. 

Oodiva.  No  judgments  then  to-morrow,  Leofric  ? 

Leofric.  None :  we  will  carouse. 

Godiva.  The  saints  of  heaven  have  given  me  strength  and  con- 
fidence :  my  prayers  are  heard :  the  heart  of  my  beloved  is  now 
softened. 

Leofric.  Ay,  ay. 

Godiva.  Say,  dearest  Leofric,  is  there  indeed  no  other  hope,  no 
other  mediation  ? 

Leofric.  I  have  sworn.  Besides,  thou  hast  made  me  redden  and 
turn  my  face  away  from  thee,  and  all  these  knaves  have  seen  it. 
This  adds  to  the  city's  crime. 

Oodiva.  I  have  blushed,  too,  Leofric,  and  was  not  rash  nor 
cruel. 

Leofric.  But  thou,  my  sweetest,  art  given  to  blushing ;  there  is 
no  conquering  it  in  thee.  I  wish  thou  hadst  not  alighted  so  hastily 
and  roughly:  it  hath  shaken  down  a  sheaf  of  thy  hair:  take  heed 
not  to  sit  upon  it,  lest  it  anguish  thee.  Well  done !  it  mingleth  now 
sweetly  with  the  cloth  of  gold  upon  the  saddle,  running  here  and 
there  as  if  it  had  life  and  faculties  and  business,  and  were  working 
thereupon  some  newer  and  cunninger  device.  0  my  beauteous  Eve ! 
there  is  a  paradise  about  thee  !  the  world  is  refreshed  as  thou  movest 
and  breathest  on  it.  ...  I  cannot  see  or  think  of  evil  where  thou  art. 
I  would  throw  my  arms  even  here  about  thee.  ...  No  signs  for  me ! 


v.]  THE  IMAGINARY  CONVERSATIONS.  121 

no  shaking  of  sanbeams !  no  reproof  or  frown  or  wonderment.  .  .  . 
I  loiU  say  it .  . .  now  then  for  worse.  ...  I  would  close  with  my  kisses 
thy  half-open  lips,  ay,  and  those  lovely  and  loving  eyes,  before  the 
people. 

Godiva.  To-morrow  you  shall  kiss  me,  and  they  shall  bless 
you  for  it.  I  shall  be  very  pale,  for  to-night  I  must  fast  and 
pray. 

Leofric.  1  do  not  hear  thee ;  the  voices  of  the  folks  are  so  low 
under  this  archway. 

Godiva  (to  herself).  God  help  them !  good  kind  souls  !  I  hope 
they  will  not  crowd  about  me  so  to-morrow.  0  Leofric!  could  my 
name  be  forgotten,  and  yours  alone  remembered.  But  perhaps  my 
innocence  may  save  me  from  reproach  .  .  .  and  how  many  as  inno- 
cent are  in  fear  and  famine !  No  eye  will  open  on  me  but  fresh  from 
tears.  What  a  young  mother  for  so  large  a  family !  Shall  my  youth 
harm  me  ?  Under  God's  hand  it  gives  me  courage.  Ah,  when  will 
the  morning  come  ?  ah,  when  will  the  noon  be  over  ?" 

The  second  class  of  Landor's  dialogues,  tlie  dialogues 
of  discussion  and  reflexion,  are  both  much  more  numerous, 
and  individually,  for  the  most  part,  much  longer  than  those 
of  which  I  have  thus  far  spoken.  They  also  range  over 
almost  the  whole  field  of  history,  and  include  several  of 
the  satiric  kind,  in  which  modem  statesmen  are  generally 
the  speakers.  The  description  non-dramatic  must  not  be 
taken  too  strictly,  inasmuch  as  Landor  often  introduces 
and  concludes  a  purely  discursive  and  reflective  dialogue 
with  passages  of  pleasant  intercourse  and  play  of  feeling, 
and  sometimes  enlivens  the  whole  course  of  the  discussions 
with  such  accompaniments.  Or,  again,  he  grasps  and  re- 
alizes, in  a  way  that  may  fairly  be  called  dramatic,  whether 
it  coincides  with  our  historical  ideas  or  not,  the  character 
of  this  or  that  individual  speaker.  But  at  least  as  often 
either  one  of  the  speakers  or  both  are  mere  mouthpieces 
for  the  utterance  of  Landor's  own  thoughts  and  senti- 
ments. He  expressly  warns  his  readers,  indeed,  against 
I    6* 


122  LANDOR.  [chap. 

taking  for  his  own  any  of  the  opinions  put  into  the 
mouths  of  his  personages ;  but  the  reader  familiar  with 
Landor's  other  writings  and  with  his  correspondence  will 
have  no  difficulty  in  recognizing  where  the  living  man  ex- 
presses himself  behind  the  historic  mask.  Thus  we  know 
that  it  is  Landor  himself  who  is  contending  for  toleration 
and  open-mindedness  in  matters  of  religious  faith,  alike 
in  the  person  of  Lucian  and  in  that  of  Melanchthon ;  for 
simplicity  and  integrity  of  thought  and  speech  in  those  of 
Diogenes  and  of  Epictetus.  It  is  Landor  who  transports 
himself  in  imagination  into  the  gardens  of  Epicurus,  and 
holds  delightful  converse  with  Leontion  and  Ternissa;  it 
is  Landor  who,  through  the  mouths  of  Anacreon  and  of 
the  priest  of  Ammon,  rebukes  the  ambition  of  Polycrates 
and  of  Alexander,  Landor  behind  the  mask  of  Andrew 
Marvel  glorifies  against  the  time-serving  archbishop  the 
great  poet  of  the  English  republic,  and  Landor  dictates  the 
true  policy  of  his  country  through  the  lips  of  the  Greek 
or  Spanish  revolutionary  leaders.  It  is  the  greatest  trib- 
ute to  the  range  of  his  powers  and  of  his  knowledge  that 
he  could  adapt  his  thoughts  to  so  great  a  diversity  of  ages 
and  characters  without  too  obvious  a  forfeiture  of  verisi- 
militude in  any  given  case. 

Landor's  whole  treatment  of  Plato  is  very  characteristic 
of  his  way  of  thinking  and  working.  He  would  accept 
no  secondhand  verdict  in  matters  either  of  literature  or 
life;  and  when  he  had  examined  any  matter  for  himself, 
was  none  the  worse  pleased  if  he  found  his  judgment  run- 
ning counter  to  the  received  opinion.  Although  theoret- 
ically he  disliked  and  despised  paradox,  he  was  certainly 
"  well  content,"  as  Emerson  puts  it,  "  to  impress  his  Eng 
lish  whim  upon  the  immutable  past,"  and  to  refashion 
ancient  glories  in  a  mould  of  his  own  construction.     At 


v.]  THE  IMAGINARY  CONVERSATIONS.  128 

Florence  he  weut,  he  tells  us,  every  moruing  for  a  long 
while  to  the  Magliabecchian  Library,  and  read  the  whole 
works  of  Plato  through.  Considering  what  the  works  of 
Plato  are,  and  that  Landor  was  by  no  means  a  perfectly 
accomplished  Greek  scholar,  it  is  evident  that  his  reading 
must  have  been  perfunctory.  But  it  was  enough  to  in- 
spire him  with  a  great  distaste,  and  a  considerable  portion 
of  contempt,  for  that  illustrious  author.  Landor  was  never 
blind  to  genius,  but  in  the  genius  of  Plato  he  saw  and 
noted  little  except  the  flaws  and  singalarities.  He  has 
carefully  collected,  apart  from  their  connexion,  examples 
of  everything  that  is  practically  unreasonable  in  Plato's 
views  of  civil  government;  of  everything  that  is  fantastic 
in  his  allegories,  captious  in  his  reasonings,  and  ambiguous 
or  redundant  in  his  diction.  He  has  made  Plato  cut  a 
figure  both  pretentious  and  ridiculous  in  his  intercourse 
with  Diogenes,  who  lectures  him  on  style  and  on  morals, 
reproves  his  want  of  simplicity  and  independence,  dis- 
charges at  him  a  whole  artillery  of  wise  and  beautiful  say- 
ings in  Landor's  own  finest  manner,  and  even  knocks  out 
of  his  hand  his  especial  weapons  of  poetical  eloquence,  out- 
doing him  with  a  passage  of  splendid  rhetoric  on  the  noth- 
ingness and  restlessness  of  human  power  as  compared  with 
the  power  of  the  gentlest  of  the  elements,  the  air.  Nei- 
ther is  Landor  content  with  this  discomfiture  of  Plato  at 
the  hands  of  his  contemporary  philosopher  of  the  tub ;  he 
returns  to  the  charge  where  we  should  least  have  expected 
it,  and  in  a  dialogue  of  Lord  Chatham  with  Lord  Chester- 
field makes  the  great  statesman  turn  the  conversation  on 
ancient  philosophy,  and  edify  his  visitor  with  an  exposi- 
tion of  the  faults  and  fallacies  which  he  has  found  in  Plato. 
This  unexpectedness,  which  is  yet  not  the  same  thing  as 
paradox,  this  preference  for,  and  habit  of  lighting  on,  the 


124  LANDOR.  ,  [chap. 

thing  indicium  ore  alio,  is  an  essential  part  of  Lander's 
genius. 

To  return  to  the  general  character  of  these  Conversa- 
X '  I  tions,  their  weakness  lies  in  Landor's  inaptitude  alike  for 
;  close  or    sustained   reasoning,  and  for   stirring   or  rapid 
narrative;   his  characters  seldom   attempt  argument,  and 
r     almost  as  often  as  they  attempt  story  -  telling,  they  fail. 
'  ..'The  true  strength  of  the  discursive  Conversations  resides 
in  the  extraordinary  richness,  the  originality  of  the  reflex- 
^'  ions,  and  meditative  depth  and  insight  scattered  through 

them  —  reflexions  generally  clenched  and  illuminated  by 
images,  and  adding  the  quality  of  beauty  to  the  qualities 
of  solid  ingenuity  or  wisdom.  Some  of  the  dialogues  are 
filled  almost  from  beginning  to  end  with  such  reflexions. 
In  some  they  are  few  and  far  between.  Sometimes  they 
are  set  in  a  framework  of  graceful  incident,  and  amidst 
beautiful  magnanimities  and  urbanities  of  intercourse; 
sometimes  they  have  to  be  sought  out  through  a  maze 
of  more  or  less  tedious  disquisitions,  confused  anecdotes, 
^  and  unsuccessful  witticisms.  Occasionally  Landor  spoils 
an  otherwise  admirable  dialogue  of  antiquity  by  intruding 
into  it  a  sarcastic  apologue  against  some  object  of  his  po- 
litical aversion  in  the  modern  world.  Occasionally  he 
makes  his  personages  discuss  with  much  fulness  and  ro- 
tundity of  speech  questions  of  learning  and  of  curiosity 
that  can  be  interesting  only  to  himself ;  in  a  word,  he  does 
that  which  he  was  so  keenly  sensible  of  Wordsworth's 
mistake  in  allowing  himself  to  do — he  drones.  It  is  a 
classical,  and  from  the  point  of  \dew  of  style  an  exemplary, 
form  of  droning,  but  it  is  droning  still.  To  the  lover  of 
fine  thoughts  there  is  not  one  of  these  dialogues  which  it 
is  not  worth  his  while  to  read  through  and  through  for 
the  sake  of  the  jewels  it  contains.     But  there  are  not 


v.]  THE  IMAGINARY  CONVERSATIONS.  125 

many  which,  like  the  dialogues  of  Diogenes  and  Plato,  of 
the  two  Ciceros,  of  Marvel  and  Archbishop  Parker,  he  can 
recommend  to  the  ordinarily  intelligent  reader  in  the  con- 
fidence that  he  will  not  be  fatigued  before  the  end.  It 
should  be  said,  however,  that  the  appetite  for  Landor  al- 
ways grows  with  the  reading.  The  mansions  of  his  mind 
are  so  various,  and  the  riches  treasured  up  in  them  so  vast, 
that  if  they  contain  some  chill  and  musty  corridors  we 
may  well  be  content  to  traverse  these  too  with  patience. 
When  Landor  is  good,  he  is  so  admirably  and  so  originally 
good,  so  full  of  crushing  and  massive  force  on  one  page, 
and  of  a  delicacy  surpassing  that  of  the  tenderest  poets  on 
another,  that  to  know  him  well  repays  tenfold  whatever 
hours  of  weariness  his  weak  places  cost.  He  never  em- 
phasizes or  separates  his  own  good  sayings,  but  delivers 
himself  of  his  best  and  of  his  worst  with  the  same  com- 
posure and  completeness. 

During  these  eight  years  of  sustained  and,  on  the  whole, 
victorious  literary  effort,  the  outward  life  of  Landor  had 
not  failed  to  exhibit  the  usual  contrasts  between  his  doc- 
trine and  his  practice.  The  author  of  the  maxim  "  neither 
to  give  nor  to  take  ofience  is  surely  the  best  thing  in  life," 
had  been  taking  and  giving  offence  as  superfluously  as 
ever.  We  have  already  witnessed  the  bursting  of  two 
storms  in  the  course  of  his  relations  with  his  publishers; 
others  had  gathered  nearer  home.  Landor  had  found  or 
invented  cause  of  dudgeon  against  members  both  of  the 
English  embassy  and  of  the  native  magistrature  at  Flor- 
ence. He  had,  it  is  said,  challenged  a  secretary  of  legation 
for  whistling  in  the  street  when  Mrs.  Landor  passed,  and 
had  written  a  formal  complaint  to  the  Foreign  Office  con- 
cerning the  character  of  "the  wretches  they  employed 
abroad."     He  had  persuaded  himself  that  he  was  a  man 


126  LANDOR.  [chap. 

marked  out  for  petty  persecution  by  the  agents  of  author- 
ity both  in  Italy  and  England.  He  was  on  terms  of  per- 
manent misunderstanding  with  the  police.  Some  of  the 
expressions  and  anecdotes  concerning  Florentine  society 
which  he  had  introduced  into  one  of  his  first  Conversations 
had  been  translated,  and  had  further  helped  to  plunge  him 
in  hot  water.  With  his  lofty  standards  of  honour  and 
veracity,  of  independence  and  decorum,  he  had  indeed  con- 
ceived a  sovereign  contempt  for  the  character,  if  not  of  the 
Italian  people  in  general,  at  any  rate  of  the  city  popula- 
tion in  the  midst  of  which  he  lived.  His  arbitrary  indig- 
nations and  eccentricities  made  him  seem  to  them,  on  his 
part,  the  most  ideally  mad  of  all  mad  Englishmen.  His 
residence  at  the  Medici  palace  was  brought  to  an  untimely 
end  by  a  quarrel  with  his  landlord,  a  marquis  bearing  the 
historic  name  of  the  house.  Landor  imagined  that  this 
marquis  had  unfairly  seduced  away  his  coachman,  and 
wrote  to  complain  accordingly.  The  next  day  the  mar- 
quis came  strutting  with  his  hat  on  into  the  room  where 
Mrs.  Landor  was  sitting  with  some  visitors.  "He  had 
scarcely,"  writes  one  of  these,  "  advanced  three  steps  from 
the  door,  when  Landor  walked  up  to  him  quickly  and 
knocked  his  hat  off,  then  took  him  by  the  arm  and  turned 
him  out.  You  should  have  heard  Landor's  shout  of  laugh- 
ter at  his  own  anger  when  it  was  all  over ;  inextinguish- 
able laughter,  which  none  of  us  could  resist."  Incidents 
of  this  kind,  however,  were  too  frequent  in  Landor's  life  to 
affect  him  very  deeply.  His  wrath  usually  exhaled  itself 
either  in  a  fit  of  laughter  or  an  epigram — if  anything  so 
solid  as  a  Landorian  epigram  can  justly  be  called  an  ex- 
halation. At  worst  a  quarrel  would  sometimes  give  him 
a  bilious  attack,  or  aggravate  the  annual  fit  of  quinsy  to 
which  he  had  by  this  time  become  subject. 


v.]  LIFE  AT  FLORENCE.  121 

Domestic  and  social  consolations  were  not  wanting  to 
Landor  in  these  days.  His  conjugal  relations  continued 
to  be  for  some  time  endurable,  if  far  from  ideal ;  while  in 
his  children,  the  fourth  and  last  of  whom  was  born  in 
1825,  he  took  a  constantly  increasing  delight.  He  loved 
and  cherished  them  with  a  passionate,  almost  an  animal- 
intensity  of  affection.  In  their  games  Babbo  was  one  of 
themselves,  the  most  gleeful  and  the  most  riotous  of  play- 
mates. He  could  not  bear  to  be  parted  from  them,  and 
went  half  beside  himself  with  anxiety  when,  during  a  visit 
to  Naples,  he  heard  that  some  of  them  were  down  with 
a  childish  illness.  In  his  letters  to  his  sisters  and  his 
mother  at  home,  he  made  those  kindly  hearts  the  partici- 
pators in  his  parental  delights.  This  home  correspondence 
of  Landor's  never  flagged  during  his  mother's  life.  He 
wrote  to  her  about  his  doings  and  about  the  children,  and 
she  replied  from  Warwick  or  Ipsley  with  all  the  gossip  of 
the  county.  Knowing  his  aversion  for  business,  she  did 
not  trouble  him  much  with  details  of  his  property  or  ac- 
counts, but  was  full  of  plans  for  his  future  and  that  of  his 
children.  She  hoped  that  when  she  was  gone  he  would 
come  home  and  settle  down  to  the  life  of  an  English  coun- 
try gentleman,  and  that  he  would  get  as  much  enjoyment 
out  of  Ipsley  as  she  had  herself  got  all  her  life.  She 
hoped,  and  it  was  Landor's  error  and  misfortune  in  this  to 
have  neglected  her  advice,  that  he  would  send  his  sons 
home  to  England  to  be  educated.  His  bent  towards  liter- 
ature Landor  had  not,  indeed,  like  many  men  of  genius, 
derived  from  his  mother.  She  looked  upon  his  exertions 
in  this  kind  with  a  vague  respect  not  unmingled  with 
alarm.  In  thanking  him  for  a  copy  of  his  Latin  poetry 
which  he  had  sent  her,  she  had  said  it  was  pronounced  by 
the  learned  to  be  very  delightful,  "  but  one  cannot  read  it, 


128  LANDOR.  [chap. 

to  understand  it,  oneself."  And  now,  when  she  heard  of 
the  Imaginary  Conversations,  she  only  hoped  he  was  not 
injuring  his  health  by  too  much  work.  "  For  God's  sake 
do  not  hurt  your  eyes,  nor  rack  your  brains  too  much, 
to  amuse  the  world  by  writing ;  but  take  care  of  your 
health,  which  will  be  of  greater  use  to  your  family." 

To  his  other  occupations  Landor  began  to  add,  soon  af- 
ter his  arrival  at  Florence,  that  of  a  picture  collector.  He 
formed  his  own  taste  and  his  own  opinions  in  connoisseur- 
ship  as  in  other  things,  and  acted  on  them  with  his  usual 
confidence  and  precipitancy.  He  anticipated  the  modern 
predilection  for  the  pre-Raphaelite  masters,  whose  pictures 
were  then  in  no  demand.  Of  the  works  of  these  and  oth- 
er schools,  an  almost  incredible  number,  some  good,  but 
according  to  skilled  evidence  the  greater  part  bad  or  in- 
different, passed  through  Landor's  hands  in  the  course  of 
the  next  fifteen  years.  He  liked  the  rooms  in  which  he 
lived  to  be  denuded  of  nearly  all  furniture  except  pictures, 
with  which  their  walls  were  covered  from  floor  to  ceiling. 
He  was  a  great  giver,  and  fond,  especially  in  later  years,  of 
sending  away  a  guest  the  richer  for  a  token  in  the  shape 
of  a  picture  from  his  walls.  Always  disinclined  to  general 
society,  and  particularly  to  oflScial  society,  he  found  in 
Florence  as  much  companionship  as  he  desired  of  the  sort 
that  suited  him  best.  Among  the  residents  his  chief  asso- 
ciates were  Mr.  Seymour  Kirkup,  then  and  for  half  a  cen- 
tury afterwards  a  central  figure  of  the  English  colony  in 
the  city ;  Charles  Armitage  Brown,  the  friend  and  com- 
rade of  Keats ;  and  a  Mr.  Leckie,  whose  company  is  said 
to  have  been  more  joyous  than  decorous,  and  more  wel- 
come to  Landor  than  to  his  wife.  Francis  Hare,  too,  was 
often  in  Florence,  and  when  he  and  Landor  were  together, 
the  encounter  of  wits  ran  high.     Both  were  men  of  amaz- 


T.]  LITE  AT  FLORENCE.  129 

ing  knowledge  and  amazing  memory  ;  their  self-confidence 
was  about  equal.  Landor  was  in  intercourse  of  this  kind 
the  more  urbane  and  forbearing  of  the  two,  Hare  the  more 
overpoweringly  brilliant  and  impetuous.  They  disputed 
often,  but  never  quarrelled,  and  remained  faithful  friends 
to  the  last.  Landor's  letters  to  Hare  during  his  absence 
are  as  full  as  those  to  Southey  of  the  varied  matter  of  his 
thoughts,  set  forth  in  his  energetic,  disconnected  way,  and 
often  containing  germs  which  we  find  developed  in  the 
Conversations  of  the  time. 

After  the  appearance  of  the  first  two  volumes  of  his 
Conversations  Landor  was  habitually  sought  out,  as  a  man 
of  acknowledged  genius  and  fame,  by  the  more  distin- 
guished of  the  English  who  came  to  Florence.  He  seldom 
accepted  dinners  or  other  invitations,  but  received  in  his 
own  house  those  visitors  who  brought  him  introductions. 
One  day  Hogg,  the  friend  of  Shelley,  was  announced  while 
Hare  was  sitting  in  the  room.  Landor  said  that  he  felt 
himself  like  La  Fontaine  with  all  the  better  company  of 
the  beasts  about  him.  Hogg  was  delighted  with  his  inter- 
view, and  wrote  afterwards  that  if  he  wished  to  procure 
any  one  for  whom  he  cared  a  real  benefit,  it  would  be  the 
friendship  of  Walter  Savage  Landor.  In  1825  came  Leigh 
Hunt.  In  his  short  -  lived  paper,  the  Liberal,  Byron's 
Vision  of  Judgment  with  its  preface  had  been  published 
three  years  before,  but  he  had  lately  made  his  amende,  as 
he  tells  us,  to  Landor,  with  whom  he  was  always  thence- 
forward on  good  terms. 

Soon  afterwards  came  Hazlitt;  who  brought  no  intro- 
duction, but  said  he  would  beard  the  lion  in  his  den,  "  and 
walked  up  to  his  house,"  says  Mr.  Kirkup,  "  one  winter's 
morning  in  nankeen  shorts  and  white  stockings,  was  made 
much  of  by  the  royal  animal,  and  often  returned  at  night, 


180  LANDOR.  [chap. 

for  Landor  was  much  out  in  the  day,  in  all  weathers."  Of 
their  conversations  one  is  recorded  in  which  Hazlitt  ex- 
pounded to  his  breathless  and,  as  it  seemed,  envious  host, 
the  simple  process  by  which,  under  the  Scotch  law,  he  had 
been  enabled  to  get  himself  divorced  by  consent  from  his 
wife ;  and  another  in  which,  on  Landor  saying  that  he  had 
never  seen  Wordsworth,  Hazlitt  asked,  "  But  you  have  seen 
a  horse,  I  suppose?"  and  being  answered  yes,  continued, 
"  Well,  sir,  if  you  have  seen  a  horse,  I  mean  his  head,  sir, 
you  may  say  you  have  seen  Wordsworth,  sir."  But  the 
visitors  with  whom  Landor  formed  at  this  time  the  closest 
and  most  permanent  friendship  were  not  Hunt  or  Hazlitt, 
but  the  Irish  nobleman  who,  with  his  gifted  wife  and  the 
French  Apollo  who  had  lately  attached  himself  to  their 
household,  was  making  at  this  time  his  memorable  Italian 
tour.  Lord  Blessington  had  been  known  long  ago  to  Lan- 
dor as  Lord  Mountjoy,  and  when  he  came  to  Florence 
made  haste  to  renew  their  acquaintance.  In  his  wife,  the 
fascinating  daughter  of  a  ruffianly  Irish  squireen,  married 
at  fourteen  to  a  ruflBanly  English  officer,  and  again,  after 
some  years  of  widowhood,  to  this  amiable,  cultivated, 
sumptuous,  gouty,  reformed  roue  of  an  Irish  peer — in 
Lady  Blessington  Landor  found  the  most  appreciative  and 
most  constant  of  friends.  Of  all  the  celebrities  of  her  ac- 
quaintance, and  that  means  of  all  who  were  living  in  her 
day,  Landor  was  the  one  for  whom  she  conceived  from  the 
first,  and  retained  until  her  death,  the  warmest  attachment 
and  respect.  She  thought  him  the  most  genuinely  polite 
man  in  Europe,  and  it  was  a  point  upon  which  she  had  a 
right  to  speak.  With  Lord  Blessington  and  Count  D'Or- 
say  Landor  became  almost  as  fast  friends  as  with  my  Lady, 
and  he  spent  most  of  the  evenings  of  one  whole  summer, 
and  two  a  week  of  the  next,  in  the  enjoyment  of  their  so- 


v.]  LITE  AT  FLORENCE.  131 

ciety  in  the  beautiful  Casa  Pelosi,  the  villa  whicli  they, 
occupied  on  the  Lung'  Arno.  In  1827  the  Blessingtons 
persuaded  him  to  join  them  in  a  yachting  trip  to  Naples ; 
but  as  on  a  former  trip  with  Hare  to  Rome,  so  again  now 
Landor's  pleasure  was  marred  by  his  feverish  anxiety  on 
account  of  his  children.  It  was  on  the  former  of  these 
expeditions  that  Landor  had  received  the  first  childish  let- 
ter from  his  son  Arnold,  and  had  ended  his  own  answer 
with  the  words — 

"  I  shall  never  be  quite  happy  until  I  see  you  again  and  put  my 
cheek  upon  your  head.  Tell  my  sweet  Julia  that  if  I  see  twenty  lit- 
tle girls  I  will  not  romp  with  any  of  them  before  I  romp  with  her,  and 
kiss  your  two  dear  brothers  for  me.  You  must  always  love  them  as 
much  as  I  love  you,  and  you  must  teach  them  how  to  be  good  boys, 
which  I  cannot  do  so  well  as  you  can.  God  preserve  and  bless  you, 
my  own  Arnold.  My  heart  beats  as  if  it  would  fly  to  you,  my  own 
fierce  creature.     We  shall  very  soon  meet.     Love  your  Babbo." 

In  1827  there  came  to  the  Villa  Castiglione  another  vis- 
itor, with  whom  Landor  formed  an  immediate  friendship. 
This  was  Mr.  Ablett  of  Llanbedr,  a  Welsh  gentleman  of 
fortune  and  literary  tastes,  who  conceived  an  enthusiasm 
for  Landor's  genius  and  his  person,  commissioned  a  bust 
of  him  by  Gibson,  and  a  year  afterwards,  Landor  being 
then  looking  out  for  a  new  place  of  abode,  and  desiring 
one  in  the  country  near  Florence,  came  forward  to  furnish 
him  the  means  of  securing  for  himself  a  home  that  seemed 
the  ideal  of  his  dreams.  This  was  the  Villa  Gherardesca, 
a  fine  and  ancient  house,  surrounded  with  a  considerable 
extent  of  farm  and  garden,  on  a  height  a  little  below 
Fiesole,  to  the  right  hand  of  the  road  ascending  to  that 
city  from  Florence.  By  the  beauty  of  its  prospect  and 
the  charm  of  its  associations,  this  site  was  for  Landor  the 
choicest  that  could  be  found.     His  favourite  of  all  Italian 


f 


132  LANDOR.  [chap.  v. 

authors,  his  favourite,  indeed,  of  all  in  the  world  after 
Shakspeare,  Milton,  and  the  ancients,  was  Boccaccio.  The 
Valley  of  Ladies,  described  in  the  most  enchanting  passage 
of  the  Decameron,  lies  within  the  grounds  of  the  Villa 
Gherardesca,  and  the  twin  streams  of  Affrico  and  Mensola, 
celebrated  in  the  Ninfale,  run  through  them.  The  price 
of  this  enviable  property  s©  far  exceeded  any  means  im- 
mediately at  Landor's  disposal,  that  he  had  never  even 
thought  of  becoming  its  purchaser.  But  Mr.  Ablett  in- 
sisted on  advancing  the  required  amount.  He  would  take 
no  interest,  and  Landor  was  after  some  years  able  to  repay 
the  capital  of  the  loan  out  of  the  yearly  savings  on  his 
income.  It  was  in  1829  that  he  removed  with  his  family 
into  their  new  home. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

FIESOLB  AND  ENGLAND THE  EXAMINATION  OF  SHAKSPEARE 

PERICLES  AND   ASPASIA THE   PENTAMERON. 

[1829—1837.] 

The  years  spent  by  Landor  in  his  villa  at  Fiesole  seera,  on 
the  whole,  to  have  been  the  happiest  in  his  life.  His  chil- 
dren were  not  yet  of  the  age  when  the  joy  which  children 
give  either  ceases  or  is  transformed ;  they  were  still  his 
rapturously  loved  playmates  ;  and  the  farm  and  gardens 
of  the  villa  made  the  rarest  of  playgrounds.  Father  and 
children  alike  found  endless  occupation  and  pastime  in 
delving,  planting,  clearing,  gardening,  and  the  keeping  of 
pets.  For  the  first  time  since  he  went  abroad  Lander's  love 
of  animals  had  now  full  play.  Besides  the  great  house-dog 
Parigi,  we  hear  of  the  cat  Cincirillo,  and  the  difficulty  of 
keeping  him  from  the  birds ;  of  a  tame  marten,  for  whom 
when  he  died  his  master  composed  a  feeling  epitaph ;  a 
tame  leveret,  and  all  manner  of  other  pets.  The  place 
was  as  beautiful  and  fertile  as  it  was  rich  in  associations. 
From  amid  the  clouds  of  olive,  and  spires  of  cypress  with- 
in his  gates,  Landor  loved  to  look  down  to  right  and  left 
along  the  sweep  of  Valdarno,  or  away  towards  the  distant 
woods  of  Vallombrosa,  or  the  misty  ridges  above  Arezzo ; 
he  loved  at  sunset  to  watch  all  the  hills  of  Tuscany  turn- 
ing to  amethyst  beneath  those  skies  of  pearl. 


134  LANDOR.  [chap. 

"  Let  me  sit  down  and  muse  by  thee 
Awhile,  aerial  Fiesole," 

he  wrote  ;  and  even  while  he  found  his  new  home  the 
best,  his  thoughts  went  back  with  affection  to  that  which 
he  had  left  in  Wales. 

"  Llanthony !  an  uneenial  clime. 
And  the  broad  wing  of  restless  Time, 
Have  rudely  swept  thy  mossy  walls 
And  rocked  thy  abbots  in  their  palls. 
I  loved  thee  by  thy  streams  of  yore, 
By  distant  streams  I  love  thee  more." 

To  his  friend  Francis  Hare,  who  had  married  not  long 
before,  Landor  writes : 

"...  Did  I  tell  you  I  have  bought  a  place  in  the  country,  near 
Fiesole  ?  I  shall  say  no  more  about  it  to  you,  but  try  whether  Mrs. 
H.  will  not  bring  you  to  see  it  in  the  spring. 

Dear  Mrs.  Hare, — Do  then  conduct  your  slave  (of  whom  I  dare 
say  you  are  prouder  than  ever  Zenobia  would  have  been  if  she  had 
taken  Aurelian)  back  again  to  Florence. — No,  not  to  Florence,  but  to 
Fiesole.  Be  it  known,  I  am  master  of  the  very  place  to  which  the 
greatest  genius  of  Italy,  or  the  Continent,  conducted  those  ladies  who 
told  such  pleasant  tales  in  the  warm  weather,  and  the  very  scene  of 
his  Ninfale.  Poor  Affrico,  for  some  misconduct,  has  been  confined 
within  stone  walls.  There  no  longer  is  lake  or  river,  but  a  little  ca- 
nal. The  place,  however,  is  very  delightful,  and  I  have  grapes,  figs, 
and  a  nightingale — all  at  your  sei"vice — but  you  cannot  be  treated 
with  all  on  the  same  day." 

To  his  sisters  Landor  writes  with  more  detail  and  more 
enthusiasm.  He  tells  the  whole  story  of  Mr.  Ablett's  un- 
expected kindness.  "  It  is  true  his  fortune  is  very  large ; 
but  if  others  equal  him  in  fortune,  no  human  being  ever 
equalled  him  in  generosity."  Landor  goes  on  to  describe 
the  house,  the  size  and  arrangement  of  the  rooms,  the 


Ti.]  FIESOLE  AND  ENGLAND.  135 

views,  the  two  gardens  (one  with  a  fountain),  the  conserva- 
tories for  lemons  and  oranges.  He  tells  too  of  the  cy- 
presses, vines,  roses,  arbutuses,  bays,  and  French  fruit-trees 
which  he  is  planting;  of  the  wholesoraeness  of  the  soil  and 
climate.  "  I  have  the  best  water,  the  best  air,  and  the  best 
oil  in  the  world.  My  country  now  is  Italy,  where  I  have 
a  residence  for  life,  and  literally  may  sit  under  my  own 
vine  and  my  own  fig-tree.  I  have  some  thousands  of  the 
one  and  some  scores  of  the  other,  with  myrtles,  pomegran- 
ates, gagias,  and  mimosas  in  great  quantity.  I  intend  to 
make  a  garden  not  very  unlike  yours  at  Warwick;  but 
alas !  time  is  wanting.  I  may  live  another  ten  years,  but 
do  not  expect  it.  In  a  few  days,  whenever  the  weather 
will  allow  it,  I  have  four  mimosas  ready  to  place  round 
my  tomb,  and  a  friend  who  is  coming  to  plant  them." 
The  friend  here  in  question  is  no  other  than  Landor's  old 
love  lanthe,  who  to  his  delight  had  reappeared  about  this 
time  in  Florence.  Her  first  husband  had  died  within  a 
year  of  Landor'a  own  ill-starred  marriage.  She  had  now 
lately  buried  her  second,  and  was  the  object  of  the  ad- 
dresses at  the  same  time  of  a  French  duke  and  an  English 
earl ;  neither  of  which  were  ultimately  accepted.  The 
course  of  her  own  and  Landor's  lives  brought  them  across 
one  another's  path  once  and  again  before  her  death. 
Those  who  saw  them  in  company  have  described  the 
tender  and  assiduous  homage  which  marked  his  bearing 
to  her  above  all  other  women,  and  his  allusions  to  her  in 
prose  and  verse  show  that  she  never  ceased  to  be  the  ideal 
of  his  inward  thoughts. 

The  letter  just  quoted  was  written  on  New  Year's  Day, 
1830.  A  few  weeks  before,  Landor  had  lost  his  mother. 
That  kind,  just,  and  in  her  own  way  most  shrewd  and 
capable  old  lady,  had  been  failing   since  the  spring  of 


186  LANDOR.  [chap. 

1829,  and  had  died  in  October,  at  the  close  of  her  eighty- 
fifth  year.  "  My  mother's  great  kindness  to  me,"  writes 
Landor,  "throughout  the  whole  course  of  her  life,  made 
me  perpetually  think  of  her  with  the  tenderest  love.  I 
am  not  sorry  that  she  left  me  some  token  of  her  regard; 
but  she  gave  me  too  many  in  her  lifetime  for  me  to  think 
of  taking  any  now."  So  Landor  asks  his  sisters  to  keep 
the  little  legacies  which  his  mother  had  left  him.  What 
is  more,  he  insists  on  their  continuing  to  have  the  enjoy- 
ment of  Ipsley,  and  declines  to  allow  the  place  to  be  let 
or  its  contents  to  be  sold  for  his  own  benefit.  For  the 
rest,  the  tenour  of  Landor's  life  was  little  changed.  His 
thoughts  were  as  much  his  companions  as  ever.  He  was 
to  be  met  at  all  seasons  rambling  alone,  in  old  clothes  and 
battered  straw  hat,  upon  the  heights  round  Fiesole,  and 
audibly,  like  Wordsworth  "booing"  about  the  hills  of 
Cumberland,  repeating  to  himself  the  masterpieces  that 
he  loved,  or  trying  and  balancing  the  clauses  and  periods 
of  his  own  stately  prose.  He  was  constantly  adding  to 
and  filling  out  his  Imaginary  Conversations.  One  or  two 
pieces  which  he  had  first  conceived  in  this  form  grew  dur- 
ing those  Fiesolan  days,  as  we  shall  see  by-and-by,  to  the 
proportions  of  independent  books.  But  the  first  book 
which  Landor  published  after  he  came  to  Fiesole  was  one 
not  of  prose  conversations,  but  of  poetry.  He  had  been 
long  urged  by  Francis  Hare  to  bring  out  a  revised  selec- 
tion from  his  early  poems,  which  at  present  only  existed 
in  volumes  so  rare  that  it  was  almost  impossible  any  lon- 
ger to  procure  them.  After  some  years  of  hesitation  the 
project  was  at  last  carried  out,  and  the  result  appeared  in 
1831,  in  the  shape  of  a  volume  dedicated  to  Hare  himself, 
and  containing  reprints  of  Gebir,  of  Count  Julian,  of  some 
pieces  chosen  from  the  Simonidea  and  other  earlier  col- 


VI.]  FIESOLE  AND  ENGLAND.  131 

lections,  besides  a  few  things  which  were  now  printed  for 
the  first  time.  From  Gebir,  as  now  and  afterwards  repub- 
lished, Landor  cut  out  all  passages  implying  praise  of 
Buonaparte  or  of  revolutionary  France.  Following  Count 
Julian,  he  printed  three  dramatic  fragments,  of  which  he 
had  sent  the  manuscript  to  Southey  from  Pisa  ten  years 
before ;  two  on  the  Spanish  subject  of  Ines  de  Castro  and 
Don  Pedro ;  one,  under  the  title  Ip2)olito  di  Este,  contain- 
ing some  recovered  or  rewritten  fragments  of  the  tragedy 
burnt  long  ago  at  Llanthony.  Then  followed  the  Iceland- 
ic tale  of  Gunlang,ivom  the  collection  of  1805.  Between 
the  love-pieces  and  the  elegies  selected  from  the  Simoni- 
dea  came  a  number  of  miscellaneous  poems,  some  old  and 
some  new.  Landor  showed  that  his  wrath  against  his 
Welsh  persecutors  had  not  even  yet  subsided  by  printing 
a  long  and  laboured  set  of  Hudibrastics,  written  at  the 
time  against  the  adverse  counsel  Taunton.  Much  better  to 
read,  perhaps  indeed  the  best  of  all  Landor's  short  poems 
in  the  quality  of  deliberate,  delicate,  meditative  descrip- 
tion, is  the  Fcesulan  Idyl,  from  which  we  have  already 
quoted  the  admirable  lines  relating  to  the  love  of  flowers. 
All  naturally  was  not  idyllic,  nor  all  peaceable,  in  Lan- 
dor's new  life.  Having  been  robbed  of  some  plate  at  the 
time  when  he  was  taking  possession  of  his  villa,  be  applied 
to  the  police,  assuring  them  at  the  same  time  of  his  pro- 
found conviction  of  their  corruptness  and  incompetence. 
Thereupon,  apparently  to  his  surprise,  their  feelings  rose, 
and  the  quarrel  very  soon  reached  such  a  pitch  that  Lan- 
dor was  ordered  to  leave  Tuscany,  and  did  actually  retreat 
as  far  as  Lucca.  Hence  he  wrote  a  fine  courteous  letter 
to  the  Grand  Duke  in  person,  who  took  the  whole  matter 
pleasantly ;  and  Lord  Normanby,  Sir  Robert  Lawley,  and 
other  friends  interceding,  the  order  of  expulsion  was  tacit- 
K     7 


138  LANDOR.  [chap. 

ly  regarded  as  a  dead  letter,  and  Landor  came  back  in  tri- 
umph. Very  soon  afterwards  he  was  deep  in  a  quarrel 
with  a  French  neighbour  of  his  own  at  Fiesole,  a  M,  An- 
toir,  living  on  a  property  of  which  the  tenant  had  a  cus- 
tomary right  to  the  surplus  water  from  the  fountain  of 
the  Villa  Gherardesca.  The  watering  of  Landor's  flowers 
and  shrubberies,  and  the  English  prodigality  of  the  family 
in  the  matter  of  bathing,  and  the  washing  of  stables,  ken- 
nels, and  cages,  reduced  this  surplus  to  practically  nothing. 
Hence  a  grievance,  of  course  passionately  resented.  A 
duel  between  the  disputants  having  been  averted  by  the 
wisdom  of  Mr.  Kirkup,  whom  Landor  had  chosen  to  be 
his  second,  there  ensued  a  litigation  which  lasted  for 
years ;  the  case  being  tried  and  retried  in  all  the  courts  of 
Tuscany.' 

But  these  combative  and  explosive  aspects  of  Landor's 
nature  were  much  more  rarely  revealed  in  ordinary  social 
intercourse  than  of  old.  The  impression  which  he  made 
during  these  years  upon  his  favoured  guests  and  visitors 
was  one  of  noble  geniality  as  well  as  of  imposing  force. 
A  new,  close,  and  joyous  friendship  formed  by  him  in 
these  days,  and  never  dropped  afterwards,  was  with  Mr. 
Kenyon,  the  friend  also  of  the  Hares  and  of  many  of  the 
most  distinguished  men  of  the  next  succeeding  generation. 
He  had  during  a  part  of  his  life  at  Fiesole  a  pleasant 
neighbour  in  the  novelist  G.  P.  R.  James,  to  whom  he  af- 
terwards made  allusion  as  "  my  hearty  Tory  friend,  Mr. 
James,  whose  Mary  of  Burgundy  Scott  himself  (were  he 
envious)  might  have  envied."  That  zealous  and  open- 
minded  cultivator  of  men  of  genius,  Crabbe  Robinson,  al- 

'  The  pleas  brought  forward  on  Landor's  side,  before  the  court  of 
final  appeal,  constitute  a  stout  quarto  pamphlet,  in  a  hundred  and 
twelve  numbered  paragraphs,  dated  1841. 


VI,]  FIESOLE  AND  ENGLAND.  139 

ready  familiar  with  Southey  and  Wordsworth,  came  to 
Florence  in  the  summer  of  1830,  and  presented  himself 
immediately  at  the  Villa  Gherardesca.  "  To  Landor's  so- 
ciety," writes  Robinson,  "  I  owed  much  of  my  highest  en- 
joyment during  my  stay  at  Florence.  He  was  a  man  of 
florid  complexion,  with  large,  full  eyes,  altogether  a  '  leo- 
nine '  man,  and  with  a  fierceness  of  tone  well  suited  to  his 
name ;  his  decisions  being  confident,  and  on  all  subjects, 
whether  of  taste  or  life,  unqualified  ;  each  standing  for  it- 
self, not  caring  whether  it  was  in  harmony  with  what  had 
gone  before  or  would  follow  from  the  same  oracular  lips. 
He  was  conscious  of  his  own  infirmity  of  temper,  and  told 
me  he  saw  few  persons,  because  he  could  not  bear  contra- 
diction. Certamly,  I  frequently  did  contradict  him ;  yet 
his  attentions  to  me,  both  this  and  the  following  year, 
were  unwearied."  He  tells  elsewhere  how  Landor  used 
to  invite  him  to  his  villa  constantly  of  evenings,  and  send 
him  back  always  at  night  under  escort  of  the  dog  Parigi, 
who  understood  his  duty  perfectly,  and  would  attend  the 
visitor  as  far  as  the  city  gates,  and  duly  return  by  himself 
to  the  villa.  Robinson's  account  is  further  valuable  as  mak- 
ing us  realize  the  mingled  respect,  amusement,  and  aston- 
ishment with  which  Landor  was  regarded  by  his  Italian 
neighbours  and  workpeople.  ^''Tutti  gVIngUsi  sono  pazzi, 
ma  questo  poiP^ — such,  according  to  another  witness,  was 
the  sentence  in  which  their  impressions  were  summed  up. 
His  passionate  dealings  with  his  fellow-creatures,  and  his 
tenderness  for  the  inanimate  things  of  nature,  were  in  like 
manner  typified  in  the  local  legend  which  represented  him 
as  having  once  thrown  his  cook  out  of  window,  and  in- 
stantly afterwards  thrust  out  his  head  with  the  exclama- 
tion, "  Good  God,  I  forgot  the  violets  !" 

In  the  early  summer  of  1832,  at  the  urgent  request  of 


140  LANDOR.  [chap. 

Mr.  Ablett  and  of  other  friends,  Landor  left  Fiesole  on  a 
visit  to  Enojland.  It  was  the  first  time  he  had  been  in  his 
native  country  for  eighteen  years.  His  stay  seems  to 
have  given  almost  unmixed  pleasure  both  to  himself  and 
to  those  w^ith  whom  he  was  brought  in  contact.  He 
found  his  friend  Madame  de  Molande  at  Brighton,  "in 
the  midst  of  music,  dancing,  and  fashionable  people  turn- 
ed radicals.  This  amused  me  highly."  The  excitement 
concerning  the  passing  of  the  reform  bill  was  at  that 
moment  at  its  height:  "The  people  are  half  mad  about 
the  king  and  the  Tories."  On  a  flying  passage  through 
London  Landor  was  hospitably  entertained  by  the  friend- 
ly Robinson,  who  took  him  to  see  Flaxman  one  day, 
Charles  Lamb  another,  and  Coleridge  a  third.  In  his 
praise  of  Flaxman,  the  one  living  Englishman  who  shared, 
although  not  his  scholarship,  his  natural  aflBnity  with  the 
genius  of  Greece,  Landor  seemed  to  his  companion  wildly 
enthusiastic.  With  Lamb,  whose  life  was  then  drawing 
to  its  close,  and  with  his  sister,  Landor  was  no  less  delight- 
ed. Not  so  with  Coleridge,  although  that  philosopher  put 
on  a  new  suit  of  clothes  in  his  honour,  and  made  him  as 
many  pretty  speeches  as  if  he  had  been  a  young  girl ;  but 
his  talk  was  all  about  himself,  and  he  displeased  Landor 
by  taking  no  notice  of  an  enthusiastic  mention  of  Southey. 
He  next  went  to  make  at  last  the  personal  acquaintance 
of  Julius  Hare  at  Cambridge.  It  must  have  been  at  this 
time  that  Hare  persuaded  Landor  to  become  a  contributor 
to  the  Philological  Museum,  a  periodical  lately  founded 
by  himself  and  some  other  Cambridge  scholars.  In  it 
Landor  published  in  this  year  a  selection  of  pieces  in  Latin 
verse,  including  that  charming  address  to  his  eldest  son, 
of  which  mention  has  already  been  made  above  (p.  10). 
Next  year  followed  in  the  same  journal  one  of  the  stateliest 


VI.]  riESOLE  AND  ENGLAND.  141 

and  most  diversified  of  Landor's  classical  dialogues,  in 
which  Scipio  is  found  conversing  with  Pansetius  and 
Polybius  beside  the  ruins  of  Carthage.  The  strength  of 
Rome  and  the  culture  of  Greece  are  celebrated  with  equal 
eloquence,  and  a  tale,  such  as  Landor  loved,  of  perilously 
delightful  converse  between  an  elderly  philosopher  and  a 
beautiful  girl,  is  told  in  his  peculiar  vein  of  clear  and  cap- 
tivating Greek  grace,  of  ever  appropriate  but  never  fore- 
seen or  familiar  imagery.  Landor  never  long  remembered 
any  of  his  own  writings  after  he  had  finished  them,  and 
it  is  to  be  regretted  that  he  has  weakened  the  originali- 
ty of  this  admirable  conversation  by  unconsciously  intro- 
ducing into  it  echoes  and  repetitions  both  from  that  of 
Epicurus  and  that  of  the  two  Ciceros, 

From  Cambridge  Landor  went  to  see  his  sisters  at  War- 
wick, and  thence  to  stay  with  his  benefactor  Ablett,  at  his 
beautiful  home  of  Llanbedr.  The  two  fnends  went  on 
together  to  pay  flying  visits  to  Southey  and  Wordsworth 
at  the  lakes.  Upon  Southey  the  renewal  of  personal  con- 
verse with  Landor  left  an  impression  altogether  delightful ; 
but  in  the  intercourse  of  Landor  with  Wordsworth  the 
seeds  seem  already  to  have  been  sown  of  that  change  of 
feeling  on  Landor's  part  which  we  shall  have  to  notice  by- 
and-by.  For  the  present,  however,  their  correspondence 
with  and  language  concerning  one  another  continued  to 
be  as  cordial  as  ever.  Towards  the  end  of  September 
Landor  was  back  again  in  London.  Immediately  after- 
wards he  set  out  on  his  way  home,  accompanied  by  Julius 
Hare  and  another  companion  from  Cambridge.  This  was 
Mr.  Worsley,  the  present  master  of  Downing.  The  three 
travelled  by  Belgium  and  the  field  of  Waterloo,  *'  an  ugly 
table  for  an  ugly  game,"  as  Landor  calls  it,  and  then  up 
the  Rhine.     At  Bonn  Landor  met  W.  Schlegel,  and  the 


142  LANDOR.  [chap. 

aged  poet  and  patriot  Arndt.  Of  Schlegel  he  writes  to 
Crabbe  Robinson,  "  He  resembles  a  little  pot-bellied  pony 
tricked  out  with  stars,  buckles,  and  ribbons,  looking  askance, 
from  his  ring  and  halter  in  the  market,  for  at  apple  from 
one,  a  morsel  of  bread  from  another,  a  fig  of  ginger  from 
a  third,  and  a  pat  from  everybody."  His  interview  with 
the  honest  Arndt  the  next  day  had,  however,  "  settled  the 
bile  this  coxcomb  of  the  bazaar  had  excited."  In  one  of 
the  very  last  pieces  of  verse  Landor  ever  wrote  I  find 
him  recalling  with  pleasure  how  he  and  Arndt  had  talked 
together  in  Latin  thirty  years  before  in  the  poet's  orchard ; 
how  they  had  chanced  to  hear  a  song  of  Arndt's  own  sung 
by  the  people  in  the  town  below;  and  how  nimbly  the 
old  poet  had  run  and  picked  up  an  apple  to  give  his  guest, 
who  had  kept  the  pips  and  planted  them  in  his  garden  at 
Fiesole.  At  Innsbruck  Landor  busied  himself  with  seek- 
ing for  memorials  of  the  Tyrolese  patriot  Hofer,  who  had 
always  been  one  of  his  favourite  heroes.  Travelling  by 
the  Tyrol  to  Venice,  he  sent  home  from  that  city  for  pub- 
lication an  account  of  what  he  had  learnt,  together  with 
incidental  observations  on  Waterloo  and  Napoleon,  on  lib- 
erty and  Venice,  which  is  one  of  his  most  striking  pieces 
of  high  plain  prose,  at  once  impassioned  and  austere.  By 
the  beginning  of  1833  Landor  was  back  again  among  his 
children,  his  pet  animals,  and  his  pictures  at  Fiesole.  He 
composed  in  memory  of  his  visit  to  England  three  several 
odes;  one  to  Ablett,  in  which  he  coupled  Southey  and 
Wordsworth  together  in  the  lines, 

"Live  Derwent's  guest!  and  thou  by  Grasmere  springs! 
Serene  creators  of  immortal  things;'" 

'  The  original  version  of  this  Ode  to  Ablett  was  published  in  Leigh 


VI.]  FIESOLE  AND  ENGLAND.  143 

and  the  other  two  addressed  respectively  to  Southey  aoi 
Wordsworth  themselves.  These  odes  contain  as  high- 
pitched  lyrical  writing  as  Landor  ever  attempted.  Each 
of  them  has  its  fine  lines  and  its  felicities,  but  none  of 
them  is  felicitous  or  excellent  all  through.  Landor  is 
in  this  kind  of  writing  singularly  unequal,  starting  often 
with  a  fine  thought  and  a  noble  musical  movement,  and 
flagging  and  halting  within  a  few  lines.  The  ode  to 
Wordsworth  begins  with  a  well-turned  confession  of  Lan- 
dor's  own  comparative  amateurship  in  the  art  of  poetry; 
its  central  portion  is  somewhat  obscure ;  afterwards  it  falls 
into  the  lighter  critical  or  colloquial  vein  of  verse  in  whicli 
Landor  was  generally  happy,  and  ends  with  one  of  the 
neatest  and  at  the  same  time  noblest  of  compliments : 

"  We  both  have  run  o'er  half  the  space 
Listed  for  mortals'  earthly  race  ; 
We  both  have  crost  life's  fervid  line, 
And  other  stars  before  us  shine : 
May  they  be  bright  and  prosperous 
As  those  that  have  been  stars  for  us ! 
Our  course  by  Milton's  light  was  sped, 
And  Shakspeare  shining  overhead  : 
Chatting  on  deck  was  Dry  den  too, 
The  Bacon  of  the  rhyming  crew ; 

Hunt's  London  Journal^  December  3, 1834.  The  lines  quoted  in  the 
text  were  preceded  by  others  alluding  to  the  death  of  Coleridge — 

"  Coleridge  hath  loost  hia  shoe,  or  bathes  in  bliss 
Among  the  spirits  that  have  power  like  his." 

In  a  revised  version,  sent  a  week  or  two  later  to  Southey,  these  lines 
are  changed  to 

"Coleridge  hath  heard  the  call,  and  bathes  in  bliss 
Among  the  spirits  that  have  powers  like  his." 

Several  alterations  were  made  afterwards,  and  as  the  ode  was  next 
printed  in  183'7,  the  allusion  to  Coleridge  had  disappeared  altogether. 


144  LANDOR.  [chip. 

None  ever  crost  our  mystic  sea 

More  richly  stored  with  thought  than  he ; 

Tho'  never  tender  nor  sublime, 

He  wrestles  with  and  conquers  Time. 

To  learn  my  lore  on  Chaucer's  knee 

I  left  much  prouder  company ; 

Thee  gentle  Spenser  fondly  led, 

But  me  he  mostly  sent  to  bed. 

"  I  wish  them  every  joy  above 
That  highly  blessed  spirits  prove, 
Save  one :  and  that  too  shall  be  theirs, 
But  after  many  rolhng  years, 
When  'mid  their  light  thy  light  appears." 

A  far  more  faultless  and  more  distinguished  example  of 
Lander's  verse,  and  one  not  less  characteristic  than  those 
last  quoted  of  his  warm  and  generous  appreciation  of  the 
works  and  characters  of  his  brother  writers,  is  the  elegiac 
address  to  Mary  Lamb  on  the  death  of  her  brother,  which 
he  wrote  immediately  upon  hearing  the  news  of  that 
death  in  1834: 

"  Comfort  thee,  0  thou  mourner,  yet  awhile ! 
Again  shall  Elia's  smile 
Refresh  thy  heart,  where  heart  can  ache  no  more. 
What  is  it  we  deplore? 

"  He  leaves  behind  him,  freed  from  griefs  and  ycar^ 
Far  worthier  things  than  tears. 
The  love  of  friends  without  a  single  foe  : 
Unequalled  lot  below ! 

"  His  gentle  soul,  his  genius,  these  are  thine ; 
For  these  dost  thou  repine  ? 
He  may  have  left  the  lowly  walks  of  men ; 
Left  them  he  has ;  what  then  ? 


VJ.]  FIESOLE  AND  ENGLAND.  146 

"Are  not  his  footsteps  followed  by  the  eyes 
Of  all  the  good  and  wise  ? 
Tho'  the  warm  day  is  over,  yet  they  seek 
Upon  the  lofty  peak 

"  Of  his  pure  mind  the  roseate  light  that  glows 
O'er  death's  perennial  snows. 
Behold  him !  from  the  region  of  the  blest 
He  speaks :  he  bids  thee  rest." 

Many  months  before  this  he  had  been  much  affected  in 
thinking  over  the  deaths  and  misfortunes  of  distinguished 
men  which  had  been  happening  round  about  him  in  quick 
succession,  "  What  a  dismal  gap,"  he  writes  to  Robinson, 
*'  has  been  made  within  a  little  time  in  the  forest  of  intel- 
lect, among  the  plants  of  highest  growth !"  Then,  after 
enumerating  the  deaths  of  Byron,  Scott,  Goethe,  and  Cole- 
ridge, he  alludes  to  Southey's  misfortune  in  his  wife's  de- 
cay of  mind,  and  ends,  "  It  appears  as  if  the  world  were 
cracking  all  about  me,  and  leaving  me  no  object  on  which 
to  fix  my  eyes." 

Nevertheless  new  friends  of  a  younger  generation  were 
drawing  one  after  another  to  Landor's  side.  In  the  year 
after  his  visit  to  England  there  came  from  Cambridge  the 
scholar  and  poet  to  whom  the  lovers  of  Landor  are  indebt- 
ed for  the  most  living  and  skilful  sketch  which  they  pos- 
sess of  his  career  as  a  whole.  I  mean  Lord  Houghton, 
then  Mr,  Monckton  Milnes  and  a  recent  pupil  of  Julius 
Hare,  from  whom  he  brought  to  Landor  a  letter  of  intro- 
duction. Being  laid  up  with  Florentine  fever,  Mr.  Milnes 
was  taken  by  Landor  to  Fiesole  to  recruit,  and  passed  sev- 
eral weeks  in  his  villa.  He  has  written  of  Landor's  affec- 
tionate reception,  of  his  complimentary  old-world  manners, 
and  of  his  elegant  though  simple  hospitality ;  of  his  con- 
versation, so  affluent,  animated,  and  coloured,  so  rich  in 
7* 


146  LANDOR.  [chap. 

knowledge  and  illustration,  so  gay  and  yet  so  weighty,  that 
it  equalled,  if  not  surpassed,  all  that  has  been  related  of 
the  table-talk  of  men  eminent  for  social  speech  ;  and  last, 
not  least,  of  his  laughter,  "  so  pantomimic,  yet  so  genial, 
rising  out  of  a  momentary  silence  into  peals  so  cumulative 
and  sonorous,  that  all  contradiction  and  possible  affront 
was  merged  for  ever." 

Yet  another  pilgrim  of  these  days  was  Emerson.  Lan- 
dor  was  one  of  the  five  distinguished  men  for  the  sake  of 
seeing  whom  he  had  made  his  first  pilgrimage  to  Europe. 
Through  a  common  friend,  the  sculptor  Greenough,  Emer- 
son received  an  invitation  to  dine  at  the  Villa  Gherardesca, 
and  in  his  English  Traits,  published  many  years  after- 
wards, had  much  to  say  concerning  his  host.  "  I  found 
him  noble  and  courteous,  living  in  a  cloud  of  pictures  at 
his  Villa  Gherardesca,  a  fine  house  commanding  a  beautiful 
landscape.  I  had  inferred  from  his  books,  or  magnified 
from  some  anecdotes,  an  impression  of  Achillean  wrath — 
an  untameable  petulance.  I  do  not  know  whether  the  im- 
putation were  just  or  not,  but  certainly  on  this  May  day 
his  courtesy  veiled  that  haughty  mind,  and  he  was  the 
most  patient  and  gentle  of  hosts."  Then  follows  a  report 
of  conversations  held  and  opinions  expressed  at  the  villa, 
to  some  part  of  which,  as  we  shall  see,  Landor  felt  called 
upon  to  take  exception  when  it  appeared.  Another  Amer- 
ican guest,  made  not  less  welcome  at  the  time,  though  he 
afterwards  gave  Landor  occasion  to  repent  his  hospitality, 
was  that  most  assiduous  of  flatterers  and  least  delicate  of 
gossips,  N.  P.  Willis.  With  him  Landor  discussed  the  proj- 
ect of  an  American  edition  of  the  Imaginary  Conversa- 
tions, and  the  discussion  reached  so  practical  a  point  that 
Landor  actually  entrusted  to  him  his  own  copy  of  the  five 
volumes  already  published,  interleaved  and  full  of  correc- 


VI.]  EXAMINATION  OF  SHAKSPEARE.  U1 

tions  and  additions,  as  well  as  his  manuscript  materials  for 
a  sixth.  These  Mr.  Willis  forthwith  consigned  to  America, 
and  having  himself  proceeded  to  England,  lingered  on  in 
obsequious  enjoyment  of  the  great  company  among  whom 
he  found  himself  invited,  and  ceased  to  trouble  himself  any 
further  about  the  business ;  nor  was  it  until  after  much 
delay  and  annoyance  that  his  neglected  charge  could  be 
recovered  from  over  seas.  He  had  been  more  loyal  in  de- 
livering to  the  hands  to  which  it  was  addressed  another 
volume  in  manuscript  confided  to  him  by  Landor,  that  of 
the  Citation  and  Examination  of  William  Shakspeare.  Of 
this  Lady  Blessington  undertook,  at  Landor's  request,  to 
superintend  the  publication,  and  it  appeared  anonymously 
in  the  course  of  the  year  1834. 

The  Examination  of  Shakspeare  is  the  first  of  that  tril- 
ogy of  books,  as  it  has  been  sometimes  called,  the  compo- 
sition of  which  occupied  the  chief  part  of  Landor's  strength 
during  his  life  at  Fiesole.  Some  years  before,  he  bad  writ- 
ten to  Southey  that  he  was  trembling  at  his  own  audacity 
in  venturing  to  bring  Shakspeare  upon  the  scene.  At  that 
time  he  merely  meditated  a  dialogue  of  the  ordinary  com- 
pass, but  the  dialogue  had  grown  into  a  volume.  What 
attracted  Landor  especially  towards  the  episode  of  Shak- 
speare's  trial  at  Charlecote  for  deer-stealing  was  his  own 
familiarity  with  the  scenery  and  associations  of  the  place. 
In  an  earlier  dialogue  of  Chaucer,  Petrarch,  and  Boccaccio, 
he  had  represented  Chaucer  as  telling  a  story  (and  an  un- 
commonly dreary  story  too)  concerning  an  imaginary  an- 
cestor of  Sir  Thomas  Lucy.  He  now  introduced  that  wor- 
thy ml^gistrate  himself,  sitting  in  judgment  in  the  hall  of 
his  house  upon  the  youthful  culprit  from  the  neighbour- 
ing town.  The  account  of  the  examination  is  supposed  to 
be  written  by  the  magistrate's  clerk,  one  Ephraim  Barnett, 


148  LANDOR.  [chap. 

a  kindly  soul,  who  allows  his  own  compassion  for  the  pris- 
oner to  appear  plainly  enough  in  the  coiirse  of  his  naiTa- 
tive.  The  accusers  are  two  of  Sir  Thomas's  keepers,  and 
the  accused  finds  a  malicious  enemy  in  the  person  of  the 
family  chaplain,  Master  Silas  Gough,  who  is  conceived  as 
having  views  of  his  own  in  reference  to  Anne  Hathaway. 
The  knight  himself  is  made  to  show  gleams  of  sense  and 
kindness  through  his  grotesque  family  and  personal  vanity. 
He  has  pretensions,  moreover,  to  the  character  of  an  ora- 
cle on  matters  poetical.  After  many  courteous  rejoinders 
and  covert  banterings  addressed  by  the  prisoner  to  the 
knight,  and  many  discomfitures  of  Master  Silas,  with  much 
discussion  and  quotation  of  poetry,  and  an  energetic  work- 
ing out  of  the  intrinsic  irony  of  the  situation,  the  scene  is 
brought  to  a  close  by  the  sudden  escape  of  the  prisoner, 
who  darts  out  of  the  hall  before  any  one  can  lay  hands 
upon  him,  and  in  a  trice  is  seen  galloping  past  reach  of 
pursuit  upon  his  father's  sorrel  mare. 

This  is  the  longest  and  most  sustained  attempt  ever 
made  by  Landor  at  witty  or  humorous  writing.  One  of 
the  greatest  of  humorists,  Charles  Lamb,  is  reported  to 
have  said  of  the  book,  which  appeared  a  few  weeks  before 
his  death,  that  only  two  men  could  have  written  it,  namely, 
the  man  who  did  write  it,  or  he  on  whom  it  was  written. 
This  friendly  formula  was  probably  uttered  with  little 
meaning ;  but  by  Mr.  Forster  it  has  been  taken  in  all  seri- 
ousness. One  of  the  earliest  literary  efforts  of  that  zeal- 
ous biographer  himself  was  an  enthusiastic  review  of  the 
Examination  of  ShaJcspeare  when  it  appeared ;  and  in 
writing  Landor's  life  five-and-thirty  years  later  he  showed 
himself  as  enthusiastic  as  ever.  Mrs.  Browning  has  ex- 
pressed a  similar  opinion,  but  I  think  it  is  one  few  stu- 
dents are  likely  to  share.     Landor's  natural  style  is  almost 


VI.  J  EXAMINATION  OF  SHAKSPEARE.  149 

too  weighty  ;  his  imitation  of  the  seventeenth-century  dic- 
tion in  this  scene  renders  it  even  cumbrous.  The  imita- 
tive character  of  the  prose  is  moreover  quite  out  of  keep- 
ing with  the  purely  Landorian  style  of  the  verses  with 
which  the  dialogue  is  interspersed.  "  Is  there  a  man  wise 
enough,"  wrote  Landor  once,  "to  know  whether  he  himself 
is  witty  or  not,  to  the  extent  he  aims  at  ?  I  doubt  whether 
any  question  needs  more  self-examination.  It  is  only  the 
fool's  heart  that  is  at  rest  upon  it."  That  Landor's  own 
heart  was  not  fully  at  rest  on  the  question  he  shows  by 
saying  of  the  Examination,  when  he  sent  it  off,  "  It  is  full 
of  fun,  I  know  not  whether  of  wit."  It  is  evident  that 
Landor's  ample,  exaggerative,  broadly  ironical  vein  of  fun 
needed,  in  order  to  commend  it  to  others,  the  help  of  his 
own  genial  presence  and  exulting,  irresistible  laugh.  As 
conveyed  by  his  strong-backed,  stately-paced  written  sen- 
tences, its  effect  is  to  oppress  rather  than  to  exhilarate ; 
such  at  least  is  the  feeling  of  the  present  writer.  Witty, 
in  a  towering,  substantia],  solidly  ingenious  way,  Landor 
unquestionably  is ;  but  tellingly  or  adroitly  so  he  is  not ; 
the  trick  of  lightness,  grotesqueness,  of  airy  or  grim  ban- 
ter, of  rapidity  and  flash,  is  not  within  the  compass  of 
his  powers. 

Cumbrous  as  may  be  its  pace,  loaded  its  wit,  the  Ex- 
amination is  nevertheless  rich  in  original  thought  and  in- 
vention, and  in  wise  and  tender  sayings ;  and  some  of  the 
verses  scattered  through  it,  particularly  the  piece  called  the 
Maid'^s  Lament,  are  excellent.  But,  on  the  whole,  it  seems 
to  me  the  nearest  approach  to  an  elaborate  failure  made 
by  Landor  in  this  form  of  writing.  The  personage  of 
Shakspeare  himself  is  certainly  less  successful  than  that  of 
Sir  Thomas  Lucy.  A  single  brief  quotation  may  serve  to 
show  how  energetically  the  author  contrives  to  push  his 


150  LANDOR.  [chap. 

own  vein  of  irony,  and  at  the  same  time  of  poetry,  into 
the  utterances  of  the  didactic  knight.  Waiving  a  prom- 
ised lecture  to  the  prisoner  on  the  meaning  of  the  words 
"  natural  cause,"  Sir  Thomas  Lucy  goes  on  : 

"Thy  mind  being  unprepared  for  higher  cogitations,  and  the 
groundwork  and  religious  duty  not  being  well  rammer-beaten  and 
flinted,  I  do  pass  over  this  supererogatory  point,  and  inform  thee 
rather  that  bucks  and  swans  and  herons  have  something  in  their 
very  names  announcing  them  of  knightly  appurtenance.  And  (God 
forfend  that  evil  do  ensue  therefrom !)  that  a  goose  on  the  common, 
or  a  game-cock  on  the  loft  of  cottager  or  villager,  may  be  seized, 
bagged,  and  abducted,  with  far  less  oilence  to  the  laws.  In  a  buck 
there  is  something  so  gainly  and  so  grand,  he  treadeth  the  earth  with 
such  ease  and  such  agility,  he  abstaineth  from  all  other  animals  with 
such  punctiUous  avoidance,  one  would  imagine  God  created  him  when 
He  created  knighthood.  In  the  swan  there  is  such  purity,  such  cold- 
ness is  there  in  the  element  he  inhabiteth,  such  solitude  of  station, 
that  verily  he  doth  remind  me  of  the  Virgin  Queen  herself.  Of  the 
heron  I  have  less  to  say,  not  having  him  about  me;  but  I  never 
heard  his  lordly  croak  without  the  conceit  that  it  resembled  a  chan- 
cellor's or  a  primate's." 

Following  the  Examination  of  Shakspeare  in  the  same 
volume,  and  in  a  far  happier  vein,  was  a  conversation,  also 
feigned  to  have  been  preserved  by  the  same  scribe,  Ephra- 
ira  Barnett,  between  Essex  and  Spenser  after  the  burning 
of  the  poet's  house  and  of  his  children  in  Ireland.  This 
is,  indeed,  one  of  the  noblest  of  all  Landor's  dialogues  of 
passion.  Caring  little  for  Spenser's  poetry,  he  had  always 
been  interested  in  his  View  of  the  State  of  Affairs  in  Ire- 
land;  and  Ireland  in  the  wild  days  of  the  tithe  rebellion, 
which  was  at  its  height  when  Landor  wrote,  was  in  the 
foreground  of  all  men's  thoughts.  The  beginning  of  the 
dialogue  is  political ;  Essex,  who  has  just  been  charged 
with  the  settlement  of  the  kingdom,  questions  Spenser 


( 


VI.]  PERICLES  AND  ASPASIA.  151 

without  at  first  noticing  Ms  anguish  and  perturbation. 
Then  follows  the  famous  passage  in  which  the  revelation 
of  the  poet's  misfortunes  is  at  length  forced  from  him.  The 
noble  courtesy  of  Essex,  and  the  tenderness  and  imaginative 
beauty  of  the  attempts  made  by  him  to  console  his  friend 
before  he  knows  the  full  nature  of  the  misfortune,  are  set 
in  his  finest  contrast  with  the  crushed  despair  of  Spenser, 
his  shrinking  from  the  intolerable  memories  within  him, 
and  the  spasm  almost  of  madness  with  which  those  mem- 
ories at  last  burst  from  his  lips,  yet  without  ever  tear- 
ing or  forcing  the  strong  fabric  of  the  language  in  which 
they  are  conveyed.  This  is  the  dialogue  to  which  per- 
haps first  of  all  the  reader  should  turn  who  wishes  to  form 
an  idea  of  Landor's  peculiar  dramatic  power  and  dramatic 
method. 

The  second  book  planned,  and  in  great  part  written,  by 
Landor  at  Fiesole  was  on  a  Greek  theme — Pericles  and 
Aspasia — and  filled  two  volumes.  It  is  characteristic  of 
the  author  that  he  chose  for  the  treatment  of  this  subject 
a  form  which  no  one  else  would  have  thought  of,  namely, 
the  epistolary.  He  originally  intended  to  introduce  con- 
versations as  well,  but  in  the  end  decided  not  to  do  so,  and 
the  book  as  it  stands  consists  entirely  of  imaginary  letters 
from  Pericles  to  Aspasia,  from  Aspasia  to  Pericles,  and 
from  a  few  minor  personages  to  each  of  them.  The  chief 
of  these  subordinate  correspondents  is  Cleone,  a  friend 
and  former  companion  of  Aspasia  at  Miletus.  Cleone  is 
in  love  with  a  youth,  Xeniades,  who  himself  hopelessly 
loves  Aspasia,  and,  following  her  to  Athens,  dies  there. 
Famous  personages  of  Greek  history,  as  Anaxagoras  and 
Alcibiades,  take  part  also  in  the  correspondence.  It  is 
made  to  begin  with  the  arrival  of  Aspasia  in  Athens,  and 
her  first  meeting  with  Pericles,  which  is  represented  as 


162  LANDOR.  [chap. 

taMng  place  at  a  performance  of  the  Prometheus  Bound 
of  ^schylus,  and  it  ends  with  the  death  of  Pericles  during 
the  plague  of  Athens  and  the  occupation  of  the  Athenian^, 
territory  by  the  Spartans.  Landor,  as  he  used  to  say, 
loved  walking  upon  the  heights;  he  loved  to  think  him- 
self into  fellow-citizenship  with  the  greatest  figures  of  the 
greatest  ages  of  history;  and  he  created  for  himself  in 
Pericles  and  Aspasia  an  opportunity  for  pouring  out  all 
that  he  had  imagined  or  reflected  concerning  the  golden 
age  of  Greece.  His  sense  of  the  glories  of  that  age  can 
best  be  realized  by  reading  the  language  which  he  himself 
puts  into  the  mouth  of  Pericles.  Conscious  of  his  ap- 
proaching end,  Pericles  writes  a  farewell  letter  to  Aspasia, 
whom  he  has  sent  into  the  country  out  of  reach  of  con- 
tagion : 

"  It  is  right  and  orderly  (he  begins)  that  he  who  has  partaken 
so  largely  in  the  prosperity  of  the  Athenians,  should  close  the  proces- 
sion of  their  calamities.  The  fever  that  has  depopulated  our  city 
returned  upon  me  last  night,  and  Hippocrates  and  Acron  tell  me 
that  my  end  is  near. 

"  When  we  agreed,  0  Aspasia,  in  the  beginning  of  our  loves,  to 
communicate  our  thoughts  by  writing,  even  while  we  were  both  in 
Athens,  and  when  we  had  many  reasons  for  it,  we  little  foresaw  the 
more  powerful  one  that  has  rendered  it  necessary  of  late.  We  never 
can  meet  again.  The  laws  forbid  it,  and  love  itself  enforces  them. 
Let  wisdom  be  heard  by  you  as  imperturbably,  and  affection  as  au- 
thoritatively, as  ever ;  and  remember  that  the  sorrow  of  Pericles  can 
arise  but  from  the  bosom  of  Aspasia.  There  is  only  one  word  of 
tenderness  we  could  say,  which  we  have  not  said  oftentimes  before, 
and  there  is  no  consolation  in  it.  The  happy  never  say,  and  never 
hear  said,  farewell." 

Then,  in  a  strain  at  once  of  composed  resignation  and  ex- 
ulting retrospect,  and  in  language  beneath  the  austere  sim- 
plicity of  which  there  throbs  the  pulse  of  a  passionate 


VI.]  PERICLES  AND  ASPASIA.  153 

emotion,  lie  proceeds  to  recount  the  glorious  memories  of 
his  life : 

"  And  now  (he  concludes)  at  the  close  of  my  day,  when  every  light 
is  dim,  and  every  guest  departed,  let  me  own  that  these  wane  before 
me,  remembering,  as  I  do,  in  the  pride  and  fulness  of  my  heart,  that 
Athens  confided  her  glory,  and  Aspasia  her  happiness,  to  me. 

"  Have  I  been  a  faithful  guardian  ?  Do  I  resign  them  to  the  cus- 
tody of  the  gods  undiminished  and  unimpaired  ?  Welcome,  then, 
welcome,  my  last  hour !  After  enjoying  for  so  great  a  number  of 
years,  in  my  public  and  private  life,  what  I  believe  has  never  been 
the  lot  of  any  other,  I  now  extend  my  hand  to  the  urn,  and  take  with- 
out reluctance  or  hesitation  what  is  the  lot  of  all." 

The  technical  scholar,  it  is  true,  will  find  in  Pericles  and 
Aspasia  improbabilities  and  anachronisms  enough ;  for 
Landor  wrote  as  usual  out  of  his  head,  and  without  re- 
newing his  acquaintance  with  authorities  for  his  special 
purpose;  and  his  knowledge,  astonishing  from  any  other 
point  of  view,  was  from  that  of  technical  scholarship  in- 
complete. He  did  not  trouble  himself  about  considera- 
tions of  this  kind,  observing  rightly  enough  that  Dialogue 
was  not  History,  and  that  in  a  work  of  imagination  some 
liberties  might  legitimately  be  taken  with  fact.  Only, 
then,  he  should  have  been  careful  not  to  quit  that  sphere 
of  thought  aod  feeling  where  imagination  is  lawfully  par- 
amount ;  not  to  lay  aside,  as  he  too  often  does,  the  tone 
of  the  literary  artist  for  that  of  the  critical  and  historical 
inquirer.  Pericles  and  Aspasia,  like  some  of  the  classical 
Conversations,  has  the  misfortune  of  being  weighted  with 
disquisitions  too  learned  for  the  general  reader,  and  not 
sound  enough  for  the  special  student.  But  for  this  draw- 
back, the  book  is  throughout  in  Landor's  best  manner. 
It  is  full  of  variety  and  invention  ;  we  pass  from  the  per- 
formance of  Prometheus  before  the  assembled  Athenians 
L 


164  LANDOR.  [chap- 

to  Aspasia's  account  of  the  dawn  of  love  between  herself 
and  Pericles,  and  of  the  fascination  and  forwardness  of 
the  boy  Alcibiades,  to  letters  which  reveal  the  love-frenzy 
of  the  unhappy  Xeniades ;  then  to  others  containing  crit- 
icisms, accompanied  by  imaginary  specimens,  of  various 
greater  or  minor  Greek  poets ;  and  thence  to  original  ex- 
ercises in  poetry  by  the  correspondents  themselves.  One 
of  these,  the  fragment  attempted,  we  are  asked  to  believe, 
by  Aspasia,  on  the  re-union  of  Agamemnon  and  Iphigenia 
among  the  shades,  Landor  always  accounted  his  best  piece 
of  dramatic  writing  in  verse.  In  later  editions  there  are 
added  in  this  place  other  scenes  exhibiting  the  vengeance 
of  Orestes,  and  illustrating  the  proud  and  well-founded  con- 
fidence of  originality  with  which  Landor  was  accustomed 
to  approach  anew  themes  already  handled,  even  by  the 
greatest  of  masters.  Besides  all  this,  we  have  speeches  of 
Pericles  on  the  death  of  Cimon,  the  war  of  Samos,  the  de- 
fection of  Megara  and  of  Euboea,  and  the  policy  of  Athens 
against  Sparta ;  speeches  brief,  compressed,  stately,  uniting 
with  a  careful  avoidance  of  the  examples  to  be  found  in 
Thucydides  a  still  more  careful  observance  of  the  precept, 
"  There  is  so  very  much  not  to  say."  We  have  the  scene 
in  which  Aspasia  is  accused  before  the  assembly,  and  Per- 
icles defends  her.  Towards  the  close  of  the  correspond- 
ence w-e  find  reflected  in  it  the  shadows  of  war,  pestUence, 
and  calamity.  Finally,  after  the  death  of  Pericles,  there 
are  added  two  letters  in  which  Alcibiades  tells  Aspasia 
how  he  died,  and  how  Cleone,  arriving  at  the  house  of 
mourning  from  Miletus,  was  seized  by  infection  on  the 
threshold,  and  staggering  towards  the  garden  where  Xeni- 
ades lay  buried,  died  clasping  the  tomb  of  him  she  had 
loved  in  vain. 

In  all  this  the  strength,  conciseness,  and  harmony  of 


VI.]  PERICLES  AND  ASPASIA.  155 

Landor's  English  style  are  at  their  height.  The  verses  in 
the  book  are  again  very  unequal ;  its  prose  is  exemplary 
and  delightful.  The  properly  dramatic  parts,  the  ebb  and 
flow  of  feeling  between  Pericles  and  Aspasia,  and  between 
Cleone  and  Xeniades,  are  often  touched  with  Landor's  ut- 
most, that  is,  as  we  have  said,  with  an  all  but  Shakspca- 
rian  subtlety  and  justice  of  insight.  The  reflective  parts 
are  full  of  sayings  as  new  as  they  are  wise,  often  illus- 
trated and  enforced  with  images  of  singular  beauty.  The 
spirit  of  beauty,  indeed,  reigns,  as  it  reigns  in  hardly  any 
other  modern  writing,  over  the  thoughts  and  language  of 
the  characters,  and  the  two  volumes  are  perhaps  the  rich- 
est mine  which  English  prose  literature  contains  of  noble 
and  unused  quotations. 

As  if  the  body  of  his  book  were  not  full  enough,  Lan- 
dor  must  needs  append  to  it  two  close-packed  epilogues 
written  in  his  own  name.  One  was  political,  nominally 
on  the  Athenian  government,  but  really  full  of  his  ideas 
on  modern  and  especially  English  politics,  on  the  dises- 
tablishment of  the  Irish  Church,  the  reform  of  the  House 
of  Lords,  and  of  the  episcopacy ;  the  other  literary,  con- 
taining many  of  those  arguments  on  language  and  orthog- 
raphy, intended  for  insertion  in  the  Conversations,  of  which 
Landor's  original  draft  had  for  the  present  disappeared 
through  the  carelessness  of  Mr.  N.  P.  Willis.  That  gen- 
tleman had  in  the  meantime  not  a  little  scandalized  his 
acquaintances  in  England  by  the  book  in  which  he  had 
narrated  his  experiences.  To  this  publication,  and  to  his 
own  loss,  Landor  alludes  as  follows :  "  I  never  look  for 
anything,  but  I  should  add  disappointment  and  some  de- 
gree of  inquietude  to  the  loss.  I  regret  the  appearance 
of  his  book  more  than  the  disappearance  of  mine.  .  .  . 

Greatly  as  I  have  been  flattered  by  the  visits  of  American 
34 


166  LANDOR.  [chap. 

gentlemen,  I  hope  that  for  the  future  no  penciller  of  sim- 
ilar compositions  will  deviate  in  my  favour  to  the  right 
hand  of  the  road  from  Florence  to  Fiesole.  In  case  of 
mistake,  there  is  a  charming  view  of  the  two  cities,  and  of 
Valdarno  and  Vallombrosa,  from  the  iron  gate  at  the  en- 
trance of  my  grounds :  I  could  not  point  out  a  more  ad- 
vantageous position." 

Landor  had  by  this  time  learnt  not  to  imperil  his  equa- 
nimity by  personal  dealings  with  publishers.  Mr.  G.  P.  R. 
James  undertook  the  arrangements  for  Pericles  and  Aspa- 
sia,  as  Lady  Blessington  had  undertaken  those  for  the  jEx- 
amination  of  Shakspeare.  The  book  was  received  with 
delight  by  a  distinguished  few,  but  ignored  by  the  general 
public.  The  publisher  lost  money  by  it,  and  Landor,  with- 
out a  word  of  complaint,  insisted  on  making  good  the  loss. 
He,  in  like  manner,  paid  instead  of  receiving  money  for 
the  publication  of  his  next  book,  the  Pentameron  and 
Pentalogia.  The  Pentameron  is  a  series  of  dialogues,  con- 
nected by  a  slender  thread  of  narrative,  and  supposed  to 
have  been  held  on  five  successive  days  between  Petrarch 
and  Boccaccio,  in  Boccaccio's  villa  of  Certaldo,  during  his 
recovery  from  an  illness  and  not  long  before  his  death. 
The  Pentalogia,  which  follows,  is  a  series  of  five  miscel- 
laneous dramatic  scenes  entirely  independent  of  the  Pen- 
tameron, and  conceived  in  just  the  same  vein  as  the 
shorter  dramatic  imaginary  conversations,  only  written  in 
blank  verse  instead  of  prose.  Two  of  these  are  from  the 
story  of  Orestes,  and  are  incorporated  in  the  later  editions 
of  Pericles  and  Aspasia ;  the  others  are  between  Essex 
and  Bacon ;  the  Parents  of  Luther ;  and  William  Rufus 
and  Tyrrell ;  the  latter  a  piece  of  great  vigour  and  spirit. 

In  the  Pentameron  Landor  is  again  at  his  very  best. 
All  his  study  of  the  great  Italian  writers  of  the  fourteenth 


VI.]  THE  PEXTAMERON.  157 

century,  and  all  his  recent  observations  of  Tuscan  scenery 
and  Tuscan  character,  are  turned  to  skilful  and  harmo- 
nious account.  Landor  loved  and  understood  Boccaccio 
through  and  through ;  and  if  he  over-estimated  that  pro- 
lific and  amiable  genius  in  comparison  with  other  and 
greater  men,  it  was  an  error  which  for  the  present  purpose 
was  almost  an  advantage.  Nothing  can  be  pleasanter 
than  the  intercourse  of  the  two  friendly  poets  as  Landor 
had  imagined  it ;  nothing  more  classically  idyllic  than  the 
incidental  episodes.  Even  the  humour  of  the  piece  is  suc- 
cessful, in  all  at  least  that  has  to  do  with  the  characters 
of  the  sly  parish  priest,  the  pretty  and  shrewd  servant 
maid  Assuntina,  and  her  bashful  lover.  True,  there  occur 
one  or  two  heavy  stories,  heavily  and  ineffectively  told. 
And  many  lovers  of  Dante  may  be  shocked  at  the  unsym- 
pathetic criticism  of  that  poet  which  fills  a  large  part  of 
each  day's  conversation.  This  is  in  part  consonant  with 
the  opinions  ascribed  traditionally  to  Petrarch,  and  in  part 
represents  Landor's  private  judgment.  He  held  Dante  to 
be  one  of  the  very  greatest  of  all  poets,  but  thought  he 
showed  his  true  greatness  only  at  rare  intervals.  Recog- 
nizing in  poetry,  as  in  history,  the  part  due  to  the  indi- 
vidual alone,  Landor  holds  Dante  personally  responsible 
for  all  those  qualities  which  were  imprinted  on  him  by 
his  element  and  his  age.  Instead  of  perceiving  in  him, 
as  Carlyle  taught  the  next  generation  of  students  to  per- 
ceive, the  "  voice "  of  all  the  Catholic  centuries,  the  in- 
carnation of  the  spirit  of  the  Middle  Age  and  of  Florence, 
Landor  acknowledged  in  him  only  a  man  of  extraordinary 
genius,  who  had  indulged  in  the  Inferno  in  a  great  deal 
of  vindictive  ferocity,  and  in  the  Paradiso  of  barren  the- 
ological mysticism.  Having  no  sympathy  for  the  Gothic 
in  literature,  that  is  to  say,  for  the  fantastic,  the  unreason- 


158  LANDOR.  [chap. 

able,  and  the  grim,  Landor  collects  for  superfluous  and 
somewhat  tedious  reprobation  examples  of  these  quali- 
ties from  Dante.  He  asserts  an  extravagant  dispropor- 
tion between  the  good  and  the  bad  parts  of  his  work,  and 
fails  to  do  justice  even  to  that  unmatched  power  which 
Dante  exhibits  in  every  page,  and  which  Landor  himself 
shared  with  him  in  a  remarkable  degree,  of  striking  out  a 
visible  image  in  words  sudden,  massive,  and  decisive.  But 
all  this  and  more  may  be  forgiven  Landor  for  the  sake  of 
such  criticism  as  he  devotes  to  those  parts  of  Dante  which 
he  does  admire.  On  the  episode  of  Piero  and  Francesca 
he  has  put  into  the  mouth  of  Boccaccio  the  following 
comments : 

'■'■  Petrarca.  The  thirty  lines  from  Ed  io  senti  are  unequalled  by 
any  other  continuous  thirty  in  the  whole  dominions  of  poetry. 

Boccaccio.  Give  me  rather  the  six  on  Francesca:  for  if  in  the 
former  I  find  the  simple,  vigorous,  clear  narration,  I  find  also  what  I 
would  not  wish,  the  features  of  Ugolino  reflected  full  in  Dante.  The 
two  characters  are  similar  in  themselvos ;  hard,  cruel,  inflexible, 
malignant,  but,  whenever  moved,  moved  powerfully.  In  Francesca, 
with  the  faculty  of  divine  spirits,  he  leaves  his  own  nature  (not,  in- 
deed, the  exact  representative  of  theirs),  and  converts  all  his  strength 
into  tenderness.  The  great  poet,  like  the  original  man  of  the  Plato- 
nists,  is  double,  possessing  the  further  advantage  of  being  able  to 
drop  one  half  at  his  option,  and  to  resume  it.  Some  of  the  tender- 
est  on  paper  have  no  sympathies  beyond ;  and  some  of  the  austerest 
in  their  intercourse  with  their  fellow -creatures,  have  deluged  the 
world  with  tears.  It  is  not  from  the  rose  that  the  bee  gathers 
honey,  but  often  from  the  most  acrid  and  most  bitter  leaves  and 
petals. 

•  Quando  leggemmo  il  disiato  riso 

Esser  baciato  di  cotanto  amante, 
Questi,  che  mai  da  me  non  fla  diviso ! 

La  bocca  mi  bacio  lutto  tremante  .  . . 
Galeotto  ft  il  libro,  e  cbi  lo  scrisee  .  . . 
Quel  giorno  piu  non  vi  leggemmo  avante.' 


Ti.]  THE  PENTAMERON.  169 

In  the  midst  of  her  punishment,  Francesca,  when  she  comes  to  the 
tenderest  part  of  her  story,  tells  it  with  complacency  and  delight ; 
and,  instead  of  naming  Paolo,  which  indeed  she  never  has  done  from 
the  beginning,  she  now  designates  hun  as 

i  '  Qnesti,  che  mai  da  me  non  fla  diviso  I'. 

Are  we  not  impelled  to  join  in  her  prayer,  wishing  them  happier  in 
their  union  ? 

Petrarca.  If  there  be  no  sin  in  it. 

Boccaccio.  Ay,  and  even  if  there  be  .  .  .  God  help  us !  What  a 
sweet  aspiration  in  each  cesura  of  the  verse !  three  love-sighs  fiit 
and  incorporate !     Then,  when  she  hath  said 

•  La  bocca  mi  bacio  tutto  tremante,' 

she  stops :  she  would  avert  the  eyes  of  Dante  from  her :  he  looks 
for  the  sequel :  she  thinks  he  looks  severely :  she  says,  '  Galeotto 
is  the  name  of  the  book,'  fancying  by  this  timorous  little  flight  she 
has  drawn  him  far  enough  from  the  nest  of  her  young  loves.  No,  the 
eagle  beak  of  Dante  and  his  piercing  eyes  are  yet  over  her.  '  Gale- 
otto is  the  name  of  the  book.'  '  What  matters  that  ?'  '  And  of  the 
writer.'  '  Or  that  either  ?'  At  last  she  disarms  him ;  but  how  ? 
'^That  day  we  read  no  more.'  Such  a  depth  of  intuitive  judgment, 
such  a  delicacy  of  perception,  exists  not  in  any  other  work  of  human 
genius." 

It  is  a  part  of  Landor's  own  delicacy  in  handling  the 
passage  that  he  postpones  until  another  time  the  mention 
of  its  one  flaw,  namely,  the  fact  that  Galeotto  is  really 
an  equivalent  for  Pandarus.  Next  to  this  example  of 
what  Landor  could  do  in  criticism,  let  us  take,  also  from 
the  Pentameron,  an  example  of  what  he  could  do  in  alle- 
gory. This  was  a  form  of  composition  for  which  Landor 
had  in  general  some  contempt,  especially  when,  as  by 
Spenser,  it  was  used  as  a  foundation  more  or  less  shifting 
and  dubious  for  an  independent  structure  of  romance. 
But  the  direct  and  unambiguous  use  of  allegory  in  illus- 
tration of  human  life  and  experience  he  thought  occasion- 


160  LANDOR.  [chap. 

ally  permissible,  and  no  one  except  the  object  of  his  aver- 
sion, Plato,  has  used  it  as  well.  Petrarch's  allegory,  or 
rather  dream,  in  the  Pentameron,  is  of  love,  sleep,  and 
death.  It  is  an  example  unmatched,  as  I  think,  in  litera- 
ture, of  the  union  of  Greek  purity  of  outline  with  Flor- 
entine poignancy  of  sentiment.  The  oftener  we  read  it, 
the  more  strongly  it  attracts  and  holds  us  by  the  treble 
charm  of  its  quiet,  sober  cadences,  its  luminous  imagery, 
and  its  deep,  consolatory  wisdom.  The  thoughts  and 
feelings  concerning  life  and  the  issues  of  life,  which  it 
translates  into  allegorical  shape,  will  be  found  to  yield 
more  and  more  meaning  the  closer  they  are  grasped : 

"  I  had  reflected  for  some  time  on  this  subject  (the  use  and  misuse 
of  allegory,  says  Petrarch),  when,  wearied  with  the  length  of  my  walk 
over  the  mountains,  and  finding  a  soft  old  mole-hill  covered  with 
grey  grass  by  the  wayside,  I  laid  my  head  upon  it  and  slept.  I  can- 
not tell  how  long  it  was  before  a  species  of  dream  or  vision  came 
over  me. 

"Two  beautiful  youths  appeared  beside  me;  each  was  winged; 
but  the  wings  were  hanging  down,  and  seemed  ill  adapted  to  flight. 
One  of  them,  whose  voice  was  the  softest  I  ever  heard,  looking  at  me 
frequently,  said  to  the  other, '  He  is  under  my  guardianship  for  the 
present;  do  not  awaken  him  with  that  feather.'  Methought,  on 
hearing  the  whisper,  I  saw  something  like  the  feather  of  an  arrow, 
and  then  the  arrow  itself — the  whole  of  it,  even  to  the  point — al- 
though  he  carried  it  in  such  a  manner  that  it  was  difficult  at  first  to 
discover  more  than  a  palm's  length  of  it ;  the  rest  of  the  shaft  (and 
the  whole  of  the  barb)  was  behind  his  ancles. 

"  '  This  feather  never  awakens  any  one,'  replied  he,  rather  petulant- 
ly, '  but  it  brings  more  of  confident  security,  and  more  of  cherished 
dreams  than  you,  without  me,  are  capable  of  imparting.' 

" '  Be  it  so,'  answered  the  gentler, '  none  is  less  inclined  to  quarrel 
or  dispute  than  I  am.  Many  whom  you  have  wounded  grievously  call 
upon  me  for  succour,  but  so  little  am  I  disposed  to  thwart  you  it  is 
seldom  I  venture  to  do  more  for  them  than  to  whisper  a  few  words 
of  comfort  in  passing.     How  many  reproaches  on  these  occasions 


VI.]  THE  PENTAMERON.  161 

have  been  cast  upon  me  for  indifference  and  infidelity !     Nearly  as 
many,  and  nearly  in  the  same  terms  as  upon  you.' 

"  '  Odd  enough  that  we,  0  Sleep !  should  be  thought  so  aUke,'  said 
Love,  contemptuously.  '  Yonder  is  he  who  bears  a  nearer  resemblance 
to  you ;  the  dullest  have  observed  it.' 

"  I  fancied  I  turned  my  eyes  to  where  he  was  pointing,  and  saw  at 
a  distance  the  figure  he  designated.  Meanwhile  the  contention  went 
on  uninterruptedly.  Sleep  was  slow  in  asserting  his  power  or  his 
benefits-  Love  recapitulated  them,  but  only  that  he  might  assert  his 
own  above  them.  Suddenly  he  called  on  me  to  decide,  and  to  choose 
my  patron.  Under  the  influence,  first  of  the  one,  then  of  the  other, 
I  sprang  from  repose  to  rapture ;  I  alighted  from  rapture  on  repose, 
and  knew  not  which  was  sweetest.  Love  was  very  angry  with  me, 
and  declared  he  would  cross  me  throughout  the  whole  of  my  exist- 
ence. Whatever  I  might  on  other  occasions  have  thought  of  his  ve- 
racity, I  now  felt  too  surely  the  conviction  that  he  would  keep  his 
word.  At  last,  before  the  close  of  the  altercation,  the  third  genius 
had  advanced,  and  stood  near  us.  I  cannot  tell  how  I  knew  him, 
but  I  knew  him  to  be  the  genius  of  Death.  Breathless  as  I  was  at 
beholding  him,  I  soon  became  familiar  with  his  features.  First  they 
seemed  only  calm ;  presently  they  became  contemplative,  and  lastly, 
beautiful ;  those  of  the  Graces  themselves  are  less  regular,  less  har- 
monious, less  composed.  Love  glanced  at  him  unsteadily,  with  a 
countenance  in  which  there  was  somewhat  of  anxiety,  somewhat  of 
disdain,  and  cried, '  Go  away !  go  away  !  Nothing  that  thou  touchest 
lives.' 

" '  Say  rather,  child,'  rephed  the  advancing  form,  and  advancing 
grew  loftier  and  statelier, '  say  rather  that  nothing  of  beautiful  or  of 
glorious  lives  its  own  true  life  until  my  wing  hath  passed  over  it.' 

"  Love  pouted,  and  rumpled  and  bent  down  with  his  forefinger  the 
stiff  short  feathers  on  his  arrow-head,  but  replied  not.  Although  he 
frowned  worse  than  ever,  and  at  me,  I  dreaded  him  less  and  less, 
and  scarcely  looked  toward  him.  The  milder  and  calmer  genius,  the 
third,  in  proportion  as  I  took  courage  to  contemplate  him,  regarded 
me  with  more  and  more  complacency.  He  held  neither  flower  nor 
arrow,  as  the  others  did ;  but  throwing  back  the  clusters  of  dark  curls 
that  overshadowed  his  countenance,  he  presented  to  me  his  hand, 
openly  and  benignly.  I  shrank  on  looking  at  him  so  near,  and  yet  1 
sighed  to  love  him.     He  smiled,  not  without  an  expression  of  pity,  at 

8 


162  LAXDOR.  [chap. 

perceiving  my  diffidence,  my  timidity  ;  for  I  remembered  how  soft  was 
the  hand  of  Sleep,  how  warm  and  entrancing  was  Love's.  By  degrees 
I  grew  ashamed  of  my  ingratitude,  and  turning  my  face  away,  I  held 
out  my  arms  and  felt  my  neck  within  his.  Composure  allayed  all  the 
throbbings  of  my  bosom,  the  coolness  of  freshest  morning  breathed 
around,  the  heavens  seemed  to  open  above  me,  while  the  beautiful 
cheek  of  my  deliverer  rested  on  my  head.  I  would  now  have  looked 
for  those  others,  but,  knowing  my  intention  by  my  gesture,  he  said, 
consolatorily — 

"'Sleep  is  on  his  way  to  the  earth,  where  many  are  calling  him, 
but  it  is  not  to  them  he  hastens ;  for  every  call  only  makes  him  fly 
further  off.  Sedately  and  gravely  as  he  looks,  he  is  nearly  as  capri- 
cious and  volatile  as  the  more  arrogant  and  ferocious  one.' 

"  '  And  Love,'  said  I, '  whither  is  he  departed  ?  If  not  too  late,  I 
would  propitiate  and  appease  him.' 

"  '  He  who  cannot  follow  me,  he  who  cannot  overtake  and  pass  me,' 
said  the  genius, '  is  unworthy  of  the  name,  the  most  glorious  in 
earth  or  heaven.  Look  up !  Love  is  yonder,  and  ready  to  receive 
thee.' 

"  I  looked  ;  the  earth  was  under  me ;  I  saw  only  the  clear  blue  sky, 
and  something  brighter  above  it." 

The  Pentameron  bears  on  its  title-page  the  date  1837. 
Before  the  book  appeared  a  great  change  had  come  over 
Landor's  life.  He  had  said  farewell  to  his  beautiful  home 
at  Fiesole;  had  turned  his  back  upon  his  children;  up- 
rooted himself  from  all  his  household  pleasures  and  occu- 
pations ;  and  come  back  to  live  alone  in  England.  In 
a  poem  introduced  into  the  Pentameron  itself,  in  which 
those  pleasures  and  occupations  are  more  fully  described 
than  in  any  other  of  his  writings^  he  looks  upon  them 
already  as  things  of  the  past.  The  piece  is  nominally 
quoted  by  Boccaccio  as  the  work  of  an  Italian  gentleman 
forced  to  leave  his  country ;  it  is  really  an  address  written 
by  Landor  from  England  to  his  youngest  son  "  Carlino." 

To  this  second  disruption  of  his  home  Landor  had  been 


VI.]  FIESOLE  AND  ENGLAND.  163 

forced  by  renewed  dissensions  with  his  wife.  The  Fieso' 
Ian  household  had,  in  truth,  been  below  the  surface  no 
harmonious  or  well-ordered  one.  A  husband  absorbed  in 
his  own  imaginings,  a  wife  more  ready  to  make  herself 
agreeable  to  any  one  else  than  to  her  husband,  children 
devotedly  loved,  but  none  the  less  allowed  to  run  wild, 
here  were  of  themselves  elements  enough  of  domestic 
shipwreck.  Add  to  this  that  Lander's  own  occasional 
bursts  of  passion  would  seem  to  have  met  more  than  their 
match  in  Mrs.  Landor's  persistent  petulance  of  opposition. 
The  immediate  cause  of  his  departure  he  himself,  and  at 
least  one  friendly  witness,  alleged  to  have  been  the  lan- 
guage repeatedly,  and  in  the  face  of  all  remonstrances, 
addressed  to  him  by  his  wife  in  presence  of  the  children. 
This  Landor  had  felt  to  be  alike  demoralizing  to  them  and 
humiliating  to  himself,  and  had  determined  to  endure  It 
no  longer.  He  left  his  home  in  the  spring  of  1835  ;  spent 
the  summer  by  himself  at  the  baths  of  Lucca;  reached 
England  early  in  the  autumn,  stayed  for  three  months  with 
his  friend  Ablett  at  Llanbedr,  and  then  went  for  the  winter 
to  Clifton.  Next  year  he  was  for  a  long  time  again  at 
Llanbedr,  after  which  he  stayed  for  a  while  in  London,  re- 
newing old  friendships  and  forming  new.  In  the  mean- 
time friends  of  both  sides  of  the  house  had  been  endeav- 
ouring to  bring  about  some  kind  of  arrangement  between 
the  husband  and  wife.  In  the  interests  of  the  children, 
over  whom  Mrs.  Landor  confessed  that  she  had  no  con- 
trol, it  was  proposed  that  while  they  and  she  should  con- 
tinue to  live  together,  whether  in  England  or  abroad,  Lan- 
dor should  establish  himself,  if  not  under  the  same  roof, 
at  any  rate  close  by.  At  one  time  it  was  settled  that  the 
children  should  come  to  meet  their  father  in  Germany, 
and  with  that  view  Landor  travelled  to  Heidelberg  in 


164  LANDOR.  [chap. 

September,  1836.  But  they  never  came,  nor  were  any  of 
the  other  proposed  arrangeinents  in  the  end  found  practi- 
cable. Landor's  children  remained  with  their  mother  at 
Fiesole ;  letters  and  presents  continued  to  be  exchanged 
between  them  and  their  father ;  twice  or  thrice  in  the 
coming  years  they  came  to  visit  him  in  England ;  but 
they  were  practically  lost  to  him  henceforward.  With 
his  wife's  relations  living  in  this  country  he  continued  to 
be  on  perfectly  cordial  terms.  The  winter  of  1836-'37 
he  passed,  like  the  last,  at  Clifton,  where  he  and  Southey, 
whose  health  and  strength  began  about  this  time  to  fail, 
once  more  enjoyed  the  happiness  of  each  other's  society. 
From  Clifton  Landor  went  again,  as  on  the  previous  year, 
first  to  stay  with  Ablett  at  Llanbedr,  and  then  with  Lady 
Blessington,  now  widowed,  in  London.  The  rest  of  the 
eummer  having  been  spent  in  visits  at  Torquay  and  Plym- 
outh, he  finally  settled  down,  in  October,  1837,  at  Bath; 
and  from  this  date  a  new  period  in  his  life  begins. 

The  two  years  between  Landor's  departure  from  Fiesole 
and  his  establishment  at  Bath  had  not  been  idly  spent. 
The  last  touches  had  been  added  to  Pericles  and  Asjjasia, 
and  a  good  deal  of  the  Pentameron  had  been  for  the  first 
time  written,  either  at  the  Baths  of  Lucca  or  afterwards 
in  England.  Other  minor  publications  had  quickly  fol- 
lowed. First  an  Irish  squib  in  verse,  of  which  the  less 
said  the  better,  directed  against  the  morality  of  the  priest' 
hood,  and  entitled  Terry  Hogan.  Next  a  political  pam- 
phlet in  the  form  of  letters  addressed  to  Lord  Melbourne, 
and  called  Letters  of  a  Conservative.  The  particular  point 
to  which  these  letters  is  directed  is  the  remedy  of  episco- 
pal abuses  in  Wales ;  but  they  contain  much  political  and 
personal  matter  of  interest  besides.  For  one  thing  they 
inform  us  of,  what  students  of  Landor  seem  hitherto  to 


VI.]  FIESOLE  AND  ENGLAND.  166 

have  overlooked,  the  precise  shape  which  his  long-cher- 
ished project  of  a  history  of  his  own  times  had  latterly 
assumed,  and  of  the  end  to  which  it  had  come  : 

"  It  is  known  to  many  distinguished  men,  literary  and  political,  of 
both  parties,  that  I  have  long  been  occupied  in  writing  a  work,  which 
I  thought  to  entitle  The.  Letters  of  a  Conservative.  In  these  I  at- 
tempted to  trace  and  to  expose  the  faults  and  fallacies  of  every  ad- 
ministration, from  the  beginning  of  the  year  one  thousand  seven 
hundred  and  seventy-five.  I  was  born  at  the  opening  of  that  year ; 
and  many  have  been  my  opportunities  of  conversing,  at  home  and 
abroad,  with  those  who  partook  in  the  events  that  followed  it.  ...  I 
threw  these  papers  into  the  fire ;  no  record  of  them  is  existing." 

Landor's  reason  for  destroying  his  work  had  been  the 
creditable  one  that  its  reprehension  of  some  living  states- 
men had  come  to  him  to  seem  more  strong  than  was  de- 
sirable to  publish.  In  the  course  of  the  far  narrower  ar- 
gument to  which  his  present  Letters  are  directed,  Landor 
finds  occasion  for  these  extremely  characteristic  observa- 
tions on  the  national  and  religious  characteristics  of  the 
Welsh,  to  whom,  after  his  prolonged  visits  at  Llanbedr, 
he  feels  more  kindly  now  than  of  yore,  in  comparison  with 
those  of  the  Irish : 

"  In  the  Irish  we  see  the  fire  and  vivacity  of  a  southern  people : 
their  language,  their  religion,  every  thought  is  full  of  images.  They 
have  been,  and  ever  must  be,  idolaters.  Do  not  let  their  good  clergy 
be  angry  with  me  for  the  expression.  I  mean  no  harm  by  it.  Firm- 
ly do  I  believe  that  the  Almighty  is  too  merciful  and  too  wise  for 
anger  or  displeasure  at  it.  Would  one  of  these  kind-hearted  priests 
be  surly  at  being  taken  for  another  ?  Certainly  not :  and  quite  as 
certainly  the  Maker  of  mankind  will  graciously  accept  their  grati- 
tude, whether  the  offering  be  laid  in  the  temple  or  on  the  turf, 
whether  in  the  enthusiasm  of  the  heart,  before  a  beautiful  image, 
expressing  love  and  benignity,  or,  without  any  visible  object,  in  the 
bleak  and  desert  air. 


166  LANDOR.  [chap, 

"  The  Welshman  is  serious,  concentrated,  and  morose ;  easily  of- 
fended,  not  easily  appeased ;  strongly  excited  by  religious  zeal ;  but 
there  is  melancholy  in  the  musick  of  his  mind.  Cimmerian  gloom 
is  hanging  still  about  his  character  ;  and  his  God  is  the  God  of  the 
mountain  and  the  storm." 

One  more  equally  characteristic  quotation,  and  we  may 
close  the  Letters  of  a  Conservative. 

"  The  Bishop  of  London  groaned  at  an  apparition  in  Ireland :  and 
a  horrible  one  it  was  indeed.  A  clergyman  was  compelled  by  the 
severity  of  Fortune,  or,  more  Christianly  speaking,  by  the  wiles  and 
maliciousness  of  Satan,  to  see  his  son  work  in  his  garden. 

"  Had  the  right  reverend  baron  passed  my  house,  early  in  the 
morning,  or  late  in  the  evening,  the  chances  are  that  he  would  have 
found  me  doing  the  same  thing,  and  oftentimes  more  unprofitably ; 
that  is,  planting  trees  from  which  some  other  will  gather  the  fruit. 
Would  his  mitred  head  have  turned  giddy  to  see  me  on  a  ladder, 
pruning  or  grafting  my  peaches  ?  I  should  have  been  sorry  for  it, 
not  being  used  to  come  down  until  my  work  was  over,  even  when 
visitors  no  less  illustrious  than  the  right  reverend  baron  have  called 
on  me.  But  we  have  talked  together  in  our  relative  stations ;  I 
above,  they  below." 

Besides  this,  Landor  contributed  in  1837  to  Leigh 
Hunt's  Monthly  Repository  a  series  of  dialogues  and  let- 
ters called  High  and  Low  Life  in  Italy,  which  are  good  in 
proportion  to  their  gravity  ;  the  majority,  being  facetious, 
are  somewhat  forced  and  dreary.  A  rare  volume,  and  one 
much  cherished  by  the  lovers  of  Landor,  is  that  which  Mr. 
Ablett  printed  for  private  distribution  in  this  same  year 
183V.  It  contains  a  lithograph  from  Count  D'Orsay's 
profile  of  Landor  drawn  in  1825;  a  dedication  or  inscrip- 
tion two  pages  long,  and  in  the  most  mincingly  ceremo- 
nious vein,  to  Mrs.  Ablett  by  her  husband,  and  a  selection 
from  the  Conversations  and  other  fugitive  pieces  which 


Ti.J  FIESOLE  AND  ENGLAND.  167 

Landor  had  contributed  to  various  periodicals  since  his 
visit  to  England  five  years  before ;  besides  some  extracts 
from  Leigh  Hunt,  and  one  or  two  effusions  which  appear 
to  be  Mr.  Ablett's  own. 

Lastly,  Landor  printed,  still  in  the  autumn  of  1837,  a 
pamphlet  in  rhyming  couplets  which  he  called  A  Satire 
on  Satirists,  and  Admonition  to  Detractors.  This  is  an 
attempt  in  a  manner  of  writing  which  he  had  abandoned 
since  boyhood.  Landor  had  allowed  himself  for  once  to 
be  irritated  by  a  review ;  an  attack,  namely,  on  his  scholar- 
ship (accompanied,  it  should  be  said,  with  general  criti- 
cisms of  a  laudatory  kind),  wliich  had  appeared  in  Black- 
wood. He  now  indulged,  clumsily  it  must  be  confessed, 
in  the  somewhat  stale  entertainment  of  baiting  Scotch  re- 
viewers. The  only  things  which  make  the  Satire  note- 
worthy are  the  lines  in  which  Landor  alludes  to  his  own 
scene  of  Agamemnon  and  Iphigenia — 

"  Far  from  the  footstool  of  the  tragic  throne, 
I  am  tragedian  in  this  scene  alone  " — 

and  the  passages  in  which  he  allows  himself  to  turn 
against  the  old  object  of  his  respect  and  admiration, 
Wordsworth.  He  had  been  letting  certain  remarks  ut- 
tered by  or  attributed  to  Wordsworth  rankle  in  his  mind. 
He  had  begun  to  discover,  during  his  visit  in  1832,  the 
narrow  intellectual  sympathies  of  that  great  poet,  and  his 
indifference  to  the  merits  of  nearly  all  poetry  except  his 
own.  Now  again,  in  the  summer  of  1837,  Landor  had 
seen  or  imagined  Wordsworth  cold,  while  every  one  else 
was  enthusiastic,  when  they  were  present  together  at  the 
first  night  of  Talfourd's  Ion.  Lastly,  it  had  been  related 
to  him  that  Wordsworth  had  said  he  would  not  give  five 
shillings  a  ream  for  the  poetry  of  Southey.     Never  in  the 


168  LAl^DOR.  [chap. 

least  degree  jealous  on  his  own  account,  Landor  was  in- 
tensely so  on  account  of  his  friend,  and  forgetting  the  life- 
long intimacy  and  regard  of  Wordsworth  and  Southey, 
thought  proper  to  call  the  former  to  account  as  a  "  De- 
tractor." The  lines  in  which  he  does  so  are  not  good ; 
they  hit  what  was  to  some  extent  really  a  blot  in  Words- 
worth's nature ;  but  they  had  much  better  never  have  been 
written ;  and  we  think  with  regret  of  the  old  phrases  of 
regard — "  vir,  civis,  philosophe,  poeta,  ptfcestantissime,^''  and 
"  When  'mid  their  light  thy  light  appears."  Wordsworth, 
to  whose  notice  the  attack  was  only  brought  some  time 
after  it  appeared,  was  little  ruffled  by  it.  Neither  was 
Landor,  on  his  part,  when  Crabbe  Robinson  strongly  re- 
monstrated with  him  on  his  Satire,  the  least  offended. 
Among  other  things,  Landor  had  referred  to  his  own  lines 
on  the  Shell,  from  Gebir,  as  being  "  the  bar  from  which 
Wordsworth  drew  his  wire"  in  a  nearly  analogous  passage 
of  the  Excursion.  Wordsworth  denied  any  conscious  imi- 
tation. It  may  at  this  point  not  be  without  interest  to 
compare  Landor's  original  lines,  the  best  known  in  all  his 
poetry,  with  those  in  which  they  were  thus  echoed  by  his 
brother  poets,  accidentally,  it  seems,  by  Wordsworth,  and 
avowedly  by  Byron.  In  the  original  it  is  the  sea-nymph 
who  proposes  the  shell  as  an  appropriate  forfeit  to  be  paid 
by  her  to  Tamar  if  he  beats  her  in  wrestling : 

"  But  I  have  sinuous  shells  of  pearly  hue 
Within,  and  they  that  lustre  have  imbibed 
In  the  Sun's  palace-porch,  where,  when  unyoked, 
His  chariot-wheel  stands  nxidway  in  the  wave ; 
Shake  one,  and  it  awakens  ;  then  apply 
Its  polisht  Up  to  your  attentive  ear, 
And  it  remembers  its  august  abodes, 
And  murmurs  as  the  ocean  murmurs  there." 


VI.]  FIESOLE  AND  ENGLAND,  169 

Byron's  lines  in  The  Island  compare  the  subdued  sound 
of  the  sea  at  sunset  with  that  to  be  heard  in  the  shell ;  and 
it  is  of  a  piece  with  his  usual  swinging  carelessness  that 
the  "murmurer"  of  one  line  is  made  to  "rave,"  three 
lines  further  on, 

"  The  Ocean  scarce  spoke  louder  with  his  swell 
Than  breathes  his  mimic  murmurer  in  the  shell, 
As,  far  divided  from  his  parent  deep, 
The  sea-born  infant  cries,  and  will  not  sleep, 
Raising  his  little  plaint  in  vain,  to  rave 
For  the  broad  bosom  of  his  nursing  wave." 

Wordsworth  turns  the  phenomenon  to  account  for  the 
purposes  of  a  fine  metaphj'sical  and  didactic  metaphor, 
describing  it  at  the  same  time  in  lines  which,  compared 
with  any  of  those  in  the  passage  from  Gehir  except  the 
fourth  and  fifth,  are  somewhat  lumbering  and  diluted. 
The  shell,  Landor  said,  had  in  this  version  lost  its  pearly 
hue  within,  and  its  memory  of  where  it  had  abided. 

"I  have  seen 
A  curious  child,  who  dwelt  upon  a  tract 
Of  inland  ground,  applying  to  his  ear 
The  convolutions  of  a  smooth-lipped  shell ; 
To  which,  in  silence  hush'd,  his  very  soul 
Listen'd  intensely ;  and  his  countenance  soon 
Brighten'd  with  joy  ;  for  murmurings  from  within 
Were  heard,  sonorous  cadences  !  whereby, 
To  his  belief,  the  monitor  express'd 
Mysterious  union  with  its  native  sea. 
Even  such  a  Shell  the  universe  itself 
Is  to  the  ear  of  faith." 

In  Landor's  general  criticisms  on  Wordsworth's  poetry, 

from  this  time  forward,  there  is  perceptible  less  change  of 

tone  than  in  those  on  his  person.     The  great  achievement 

of  Wordsworth,  his  poetical  revelation  of  a  sympathy,  more 

M    8* 


170  LANDOR.  [chap,  vl 

close  and  binding  than  had  ever  before  been  expressed  in 
words,  between  the  hearts  of  nature  and  of  man,  had  in  it 
too  much  of  the  metaphysical  for  Landor  at  any  time  fully 
to  appreciate.  But  now,  as  formerly,  Wordsworth  re- 
mained for  Landor  a  fine  poet,  although  marred  by  pue- 
rility and  dulness;  the  best  of  all  poets  of  country  lifej 
the  author  of  the  best  sonnets,  after  one  or  two  of  Milton, 
in  the  language ;  and,  in  his  Laodamia,  of  at  least  one 
poem  classical  both  in  thought  and  expression. 


CHAPTER  VII. 

LIFE    AT     BATH DRAMAS HELLENICS LAST     FRUIT DRY 

STICKS. 

[1837—1858.] 

During  the  two  unsettled  years  that  followed  his  return 

to  England,  Landor,  as  we  have  seen,  continued  to  write 

as  industriously  as  ever.     Neither  is  there  perceptible  in 

the  works  so  produced  the  shadow  of  any  severe  inward 

struggle  or  distress.     Did  Landor  then  really,  we  cannot 

help  asking  ourselves,  feel  very  deeply  the  breaking  up  of 

his  beautiful  Italian  home  or  not  ?     A  few  years  before  he 

could  not  bear  his  children  to  be  out  of  his  sight  even  for 

a  day ;  did  he  suffer  as  we  should  have  expected  him  to 

suffer  at  his  total  separation  from  them  now  ? 

The  poem  of  which  mention  has  been  made  in  the  last 

chapter  treats  of  their  pleasures  and  occupations  at  the 

Villa  Gherardesca  in  a  tone  of  affectionate,  but  by  no 

means  inconsolable,  regret.     Another  retrospective  piece, 

written  at  Torquay  in  1837,  touches  on  the  same  matters 

in  a  still  lighter  strain.     A  brief  and  probably  somewhat 

earlier  Farewell  to  Italy y  in  blank  verse,  is  a  good  deal 

graver  in  its  tone ;  but  the  only  instance,  except  once  or 

twice  in  his  letters,  in  which  Landor  writes  of  his  changed 

life  in  a  strain  at  all  approaching  despondency,  is  in  the 

following  set  of  verses  composed  on  one  of  his  birthdays ; 
35 


1'72  LANDOR.  [chap. 

verses  wLich  happen  also  to  be  among  his  best ;  classically 
simple  and  straightforward  in  thought  and  diction,  and  in 
cadence  unusually  full  and  solemn  : 

"  The  day  returns,  my  natal  day, 

Borne  on  the  storm  and  pale  with  snow, 
And  seems  to  ask  me  why  I  stay, 
Stricken  by  Time  and  bow'd  by  Woe. 

"  Many  were  once  the  friends  who  came 
To  wish  me  joy ;  and  there  are  some 
Who  wish  it  now ;  but  not  the  same  ; 
They  are  whence  friends  can  never  come ; 

"  Nor  are  they  you  my  love  watcht  o'er 
Cradled  in  innocence  and  sleep  ; 
You  smile  into  my  eyes  no  more, 
Nor  see  the  bitter  tears  they  weep." 

The  same  question  which  we  have  thus  been  led  to  ask 
ourselves  as  to  the  depth  or  lack  of  depth  in  Landor's 
private  and  domestic  feelings,  seems  to  have  been  addressed 
to  him  in  person  by  some  friend  about  this  time.  Here 
is  his  reply : 

"  So,  then,  I  feel  not  deeply !  if  I  did, 
I  should  have  seized  the  pen  and  pierced  therewith 
The  passive  world ! 

And  thus  thou  reasonest  ? 
Well  hast  thou  known  the  lover's,  not  so  well 
The  poet's  heart :  while  that  heart  bleeds,  the  hand 
Presses  it  close.     Grief  must  run  on  and  pass 
Into  near  Memory's  more  quiet  shade 
Before  it  can  compose  itself  in  song. 
He  who  is  agonized  and  turns  to  show 
His  agony  to  those  who  sit  around, 
Seizes  the  pen  in  vain  :  thought,  fancy,  power, 
Rush  back  into  his  bosom ;  all  the  strength 


vii.]  LIFE  AT  BATH.        'jggm.  173 

Of  genius  cannot  draw  them  into  light 
From  under  mastering  Grief  ;  but  Memory, 
The  Muse's  mother,  nurses,  rears  them  up, 
Informs,  and  keeps  them  with  her  all  her  days." 

As  a  critical  reflexion  of  general  application,  there  is  jus- 
tice in  the  thought  here  expressed  with  so  much  graceful- 
ness and  precision ;  but  as  solving  the  point  raised  in  rela- 
tion to  Landor's  own  character,  the  answer  can  hardly  be 
taken  as  sufficient.  We  must  remember  on  the  one  hand 
that  his  principles,  both  in  life  and  literature,  tended  to- 
wards the  suppression  and  control  of  emotion  rather  than 
towards  its  indulgence  and  display.  In  life  his  ambition 
was  to  walk  "  with  Epicurus  on  the  right  hand  and  Epic- 
tetus  on  the  left :"  in  literature,  to  attain  the  balance  and 
self-governance  of  the  Greeks.  For  the  former  effort  Lan- 
dor's character  unfitted  him ;  his  temperament  was  too 
strong  for  his  philosophy ;  in  the  latter  effort  he  succeed- 
ed, and  a  part  of  the  peculiar  quality  of  his  writing  pro- 
ceeds from  its  expression  of  the  most  impetuous  feelings 
and  judgments  in  a  style  of  classical  sobriety  and  reserve. 
But  stormy  as  was  Landor's  nature  upon  the  surface,  we 
may  still  doubt  whether  its  depths  were  ever  so  strongly 
moved  by  the  things  of  real  life  as  by  the  things  of  imag- 
ination. The  bitterest  tears  he  shed  would  seem  by  his 
own  confession  to  have  been  those  which  were  drawn  from 
him,  not  by  the  sorrows  and  estrangements  of  his  own  ex- 
perience, but  by  moving  passages  of  literature,  and  the  mis- 
fortunes of  old-world  heroines  and  heroes.  "  Most  things," 
he  writes  to  Lady  Blessington,  "  are  real  to  me  except  re- 
alities." The  realities,  moreover,  which  did  affect  him  were 
chiefly  the  realities  of  to-day,  and  not  those  of  yesterday 
or  to-morrow.  A  wrench  once  made,  a  tie  once  broken, 
he  could  accommodate  himself  without  too  much  suffering 


174  LANDOR.  [chap. 

to  the  change.  Neither  the  sense  of  continuity  nor  the 
sense  of  responsibility  in  human  relations  seems  to  have 
been  practically  very  strong  in  him.  The  injury  done  to 
his  children  by  leaving  them  subject  to  no  discipline  at 
such  an  age  and  in  such  surroundings,  would  appear  hard- 
ly to  have  veeighed  on  Landor's  mind  at  all,  and  that  it 
failed  to  do  so  is,  I  think,  the  most  serious  blot  upon  his 
character. 

His  own  answer  would  have  been  that  to  separate  the 
children  from  their  mother  would  have  been  cruel,  and  to 
let  them  continue  witnesses  of  her  altercations  with  him- 
self, impossible.  The  visits  which  as  they  grew  up  they 
came  at  long  intervals  to  pay  him  in  England,  were  at  first 
ardently  anticipated,  but  failed  to  lead  to  any  relations  of 
close  or  lasting  sympathy.  In  all  that  concerned  their  ma- 
terial welfare,  he  had  in  the  meanwhile  shown  himself  as 
unreservedly  generous  as  ever.  Landor's  estates  of  Llan- 
thony  and  Ipsley  were  yielding  at  this  time  upwards  of 
three  thousand  pounds  a  year,  of  which  mortgages  and  in- 
surances absorbed  every  year  about  fourteen  hundred.  Out 
of  the  remaining  sixteen  hundred  a  year  he  had  been  in 
the  habit,  during  his  life  at  Ipsley,  of  spending  altogether 
not  much  over  six,  allowing  the  balance  to  accumulate  for 
the  benefit  of  his  younger  children.  When  he  left  Fiesole, 
he  dispossessed  himself,  in  the  interest  of  his  eldest  son 
Arnold,  of  his  property  in  the  villa,  with  its  farms  and  gar- 
dens, which  of  themselves  were  almost  suflScient  for  the 
support  of  the  family.  At  the  same  time  he  made  over 
to  Mrs.  Landor  two -thirds  of  the  income  which  he  had 
been  accustomed  to  spend  while  they  were  all  under  one 
roof,  reserving  to  himself  the  other  third  only,  that  is  about 
two  hundred  pounds  a  year.  Finding  this  after  a  year  or 
two's  experience  in  England  insufficient,  he  allowed  him- 


vn.]  LIFE  AT  BATH.  176 

self  as  much  more  out  of  the  share  hitherto  suffered  to  ac- 
cumulate for  the  younger  children,  making  four  hundred 
pounds  a  year  in  all.  On  this  income  Landor  lived,  and 
was  perfectly  content  to  live,  in  the  solitary  home  which 
he  had  by  this  time  made  for  himself  in  a  Bath  lodging. 

His  solitude  was  not  morose  or  devoid  of  consolations. 
In  Bath  itself  he  found  friends  after  his  own  heart,  and 
first  among  them  Colonel,  afterwards  Sir  William,  Napier, 
the  historian  of  the  Peninsular  War,  with  whom  for  years 
it  was  Landor's  habit  to  spend  a  part  of  almost  every  day. 
He  enjoyed,  moreover,  the  tender  regard  and  devotion  of 
his  wife's  niece,  Teresita  Stopford,  afterwards  Lady  Charles 
Beauclerk,  as  well  as  of  another  young  lady.  Rose  Paynter, 
now  Lady  Sawle,  a  connexion  of  the  Aylraer  family,  whose 
name  and  lineage  revived  old  days  and  old  affections  in 
his  mind.  He  was  accustomed  during  the  earlier  part  of 
his  Bath  life  to  pay  visits  nearly  every  year  to  a  certain 
number  of  chosen  friends,  and  most  regularly  of  all  to  Lady 
Blessington.  Throughout  the  long  strain  and  fever  of  her 
brilliant,  irregular  social  career  at  Gore  House,  beset  by 
cares  and  crowds,  and  hard  pressed  by  the  consequences  of 
her  own  and  D'Orsay's  profusion,  this  lady  never  lost  the 
warmth  and  constancy  of  heart  which  so  rarely  accompany 
promiscuous  hospitality,  yet  without  which  hospitality  is 
but  dust  and  ashes.  She  taught  Landor  to  regard  Gore 
House  as  a  kind  of  second  home,  and  he  came  to  entertain 
quite  a  tender  feeling  for  the  room  which  was  always  kept 
for  him  there,  and  especially  for  a  certain  lilac  and  a  cer- 
tain laurel  that  used  to  come  into  blossom  about  the  time 
of  his  yearly  visit.  At  Gore  House  he  made,  and  from 
time  to  time  refreshed,  an  acquaintance  with  many  of  the 
most  distinguished  men  of  the  then  rising  generation.  His 
closest  friends  of  that  generation  were  Forster  and  Dick- 


176  LANDOR.  [chap. 

ens,  who  attached  themselves  to  him,  the  former  especial- 
ly, with  an  enthusiastic  warmth  of  admiration  and  regard. 
Besides  Lady  Blessington,  we  find  Landor  in  the  habit  of 
paying  visits  to  his  old  friend  Kenyon  at  Wimbledon,  to 
Julius  Hare,  now  installed  as  archdeacon  at  the  family  liv- 
ing of  Hurstmonceaux,  to  Ablett  in  Wales,  to  Lord  Nugent 
near  Aylesbury,  to  Sir  William  Molesworth  at  Pencarrow, 
to  his  brother  Robert  in  his  beautiful  rectory  at  Birling- 
ham,  to  his  sisters  at  Warwick,  and  to  his  wife's  sisters  at 
Richmond. 

Wherever  Landor  went  he  made  the  same  impression, 
which  was  that  of  a  king  and  a  lion  among  men.  In  ap- 
pearance he  had  gained  greatly  with  age.  As  sturdy  and 
as  florid  as  ever,  he  was  now  in  addition  beautifully  vener- 
able. His  bold  and  keen  grey  eyes  retained  all  their  pow- 
er, his  teeth  remained  perfectly  strong  and  white,  but  his 
forehead  had  become  bald  and  singularly  imposing,  high- 
vaulted,  broad  and  full  beneath  its  thick  white  fringe  of 
backward  -  flowing  hair.  Every  man's  face,  as  has  been 
truly  said,  is  in  great  part  his  own  making ;  and  the  char- 
acters which  time  had  imprinted  on  Landor's  were  not 
those  of  his  transient  bursts  of  fury,  but  those  of  his  ha- 
bitual moods  of  lofty  thought  and  tender  feeling.  All  the 
lines  of  his  countenance  were  large  and,  except  when  the 
fit  was  upon  him,  full  of  benignity,  his  smile  especially 
being  of  an  inexpressible  sweetness.  His  movements  were 
correspondingly  massive,  but  at  the  same  time  clumsy; 
not,  of  course,  with  the  clumsiness  of  ill-breeding,  but  rath- 
er with  that  of  aimlessness  and  inefiiciency.  The  physi- 
cal signs  of  the  unpractical  man  were  indeed  all  of  them 
written  upon  Landor.  He  had  short  arms,  with  con- 
strained movements  of  the  elbows,  and  even  when  his  fists 
were  clenched  in  wrath  there  was  a  noticeable  relaxation 


VII.]  LITE  AT  BATH.  177 

about  the  thumbs,  a  thing  never  yet  seen  to  accompany 
tenacity  of  practical  will  or  tact  in  practical  dealings.  He 
would  put  his  spectacles  up  over  his  forehead,  and  after 
oversetting  everything  in  the  wildest  search  for  them,  sub- 
mit himself  with  desperate  resignation  to  their  loss.  In 
travelling  he  would  give  himself  worlds  of  trouble  to  re- 
member the  key  of  his  portmanteau,  but  utterly  forget  the 
portmanteau  itself ;  and  when  he  discovered  that  he  had 
lost  it,  he  would  launch  out  into  an  appalling  picture  of 
the  treachery  and  depravity  of  the  railway  officials  con- 
cerned, and  of  their  fathers  and  grandfathers  to  the  re- 
motest generation.  Next,  after  a  moment's  silence,  the 
humourous  view  of  the  case  would  present  itself  to  him, 
and  he  would  begin  to  laugh,  quietly  at  first,  and  then  in 
louder  and  ever  louder  volleys,  until  the  room  shook  again, 
and  the  commotion  seemed  as  if  it  would  never  stop. 
These  tempests  of  hilarity  seemed  to  some  of  Landor's 
friends  almost  as  formidable  as  the  tempests  of  anger  to 
which  he  continued  to  be  subject  at  the  suspicion  of  a 
contradiction  or  a  slight.  But  both  were  well  worth  un- 
dergoing for  the  sake  of  such  noble  and  winning  company 
as  was  that  of  Landor  in  his  ordinary  moods.  Then  not 
only  was  his  talk  incomparably  rich  and  full,  it  was  deliver- 
ed with  such  a  courtly  charm  of  manner  and  address,  such 
a  rotundity,  mellowness,  and  old-world  grace  of  utterance 
as  were  irresistible.  His  voice,  especially  in  reading  aloud, 
was  as  sympathetic  as  it  was  powerful ;  "  fibrous  in  all  its 
tones,  whether  gentle  or  fierce,"  says  Lord  Houghton ;  deep, 
rich,  and  like  the  noblest  music,  "  with  a  small,  inartificial 
quiver  striking  to  the  heart,"  adds  another  witness,  who 
by-and-by  attached  herself  to  the  grand  old  man  with  a 
filial  devotion,  and  who  has  left  us  the  most  life-like  as 
well  as  the  most  affectionate  portrait  of  him  during  these 


178  LANDOR.  [chaf. 

years.*  His  pronunciation  of  certain  words  was  that  tra- 
ditional in  many  old  English  families :  "  yaller  "  and  "  lay- 
lock"  for  yellow  and  lilac,  "goold,"  "  Room,"  and  "  woon- 
derful,"  for  gold,  Rome,  and  wonderful. 

Even  at  his  wildest,  Landor's  demeanour  to  his  pet  ani- 
mals furnished  assurance  enough  that  his  fury  was  much 
more  loud  than  deep,  and  that  the  quality  most  rooted  in 
his  nature  was  its  gentleness.  Dickens  has  best  embodied 
this  impression  in  his  character  of  Mr.  Boythorn  in  Bleak 
House,  which  is  drawn,  as  is  well  known,  from  Landor, 
with  his  intellectual  greatness  left  out.  We  all  remember 
how  Mr.  Boythorn  softly  caresses  his  canary  with  his  fore- 
finger, at  the  same  time  as  he  thunders  out  defiance  and 
revenge  against  Sir  Leicester  Dedlock:  "He  brings  ac- 
tions for  trespass ;  I  bring  actions  for  trespass.  He  brings 
actions  for  assault  and  battery ;  I  defend  them,  and  con- 
tinue to  assault  and  batter.  Ha !  ha  !  ha !"  Landor's 
great  pet  in  these  days  was  not  really  a  canary,  but  a  yel- 
low Pomeranian  dog,  all  vivacity,  affection,  and  noise,  who 
was  sent  him  from  Fiesole  in  1844,  and  became  the  de- 
light and  companion  of  his  life.  With  "  Pomero  "  Lan- 
dor would  prattle  in  English  and  Italian  as  affectionately 
as  a  mother  with  her  child.  Pomero  was  his  darling,  the 
wisest  and  most  beautiful  of  his  race ;  Pomero  had  the 
brightest  eyes  and  the  most  "  woonderful  yaller  tail "  ever 
seen.  Sometimes  it  was  Landor's  humour  to  quote  Po- 
mero in  speech  and  writing  as  a  kind  of  sagacious  elder 
brother,  whose  opinion  had  to  be  consulted  on  all  subjects 
before  he  would  deliver  his  own.  This  creature  accom- 
panied his  master  wherever  he  went,  barking  "not  fiercely, 
but  familiarly"  at  friend  and  stranger,  and  when  they  came 
in,  would  either  station  himself  upon  his  master's  head  to 

*  See  Prefatory  Note,  No,  10. 


vn.]  LIFE  AT  BATH.  179 

watch  the  people  passing  in  the  street,  or  else  lie  curled 
up  in  his  basket  until  Landor,  in  talk  with  some  visitor, 
began  to  laugh,  and  his  laugh  to  grow  and  grow,  when 
Pomero  would  spring  up,  and  leap  upon  and  fume  about 
him,  barking  and  screaming  for  sympathy  until  the  whole 
street  resounded.  The  two  together,  master  and  dog,  were 
for  years  to  be  encountered  daily  on  their  walks  about 
Bath  and  its  vicinity,  and  there  are  many  who  perfectly 
well  remember  them ;  the  majestic  old  man,  looking  not 
a  whit  the  less  impressive  for  his  rusty  and  dusty  brown 
suit,  his  bulging  boots,  his  rumpled  linen,  or  his  battered 
hat ;  and  his  noisy,  soft-haired,  quick-glancing,  inseparable 
companion. 

Landor's  habits  were  to  breakfast  at  nine,  and  write 
principally  before  noon.  His  mode  of  writing  was  pecul- 
iar ;  he  would  sit  absorbed  in  apparently  vacant  thought, 
but  inwardly  giving  the  finishing  touches  to  the  verses  or 
the  periods  which  he  had  last  been  maturing  while  he 
walked  or  lay  awake  at  night ;  when  he  was  ready,  he 
would  seize  suddenly  on  one  of  the  many  scraps  of  paper 
and  one  of  the  many  stumps  of  swan's-quill  that  usually 
lay  at  hand,  and  would  write  down  what  was  in  his  head 
hastily,  in  his  rough  sloping  characters,  sprawling  or  com- 
pressed according  to  the  space,  and  dry  the  written  paper 
in  the  ashes.  At  two  he  dined,  either  alone  or  in  the 
company  of  some  single  favoured  friend,  often  on  viands 
T>^hich  he  had  himself  bought  and  dressed,  and  with  the 
accompaniment,  when  the  meal  was  shared  by  a  second 
person,  of  a  few  glasses  of  some  famous  vintage  from  the 
family  cellar.  In  the  afternoon  he  walked  several  miles 
in  all  weathers,  having  a  special  preference  for  a  village 
near  Bath  (Widcombe),  in  the  beautiful  churchyard  of 
which  he  had  now  determined  that  he  should  be  buried. 


180  LANDOR.  [chap. 

From  about  seven  in  tbe  evening,  after  the  simplest  pos- 
sible tea,  he  generally  read  till  late  at  night.  His  walls 
were  covered  with  bad  pictures,  which  he  bought  cheap, 
as  formerly  from  the  dealers  of  Florence,  so  now  from 
those  of  Bath,  and  which  his  imagination  endowed  with 
every  sign  and  every  circumstance  of  authenticity. 

In  this  manner  twenty  long  years  went  by,  during 
which  Landor  passed  with  little  abatement  of  strength 
from  elderly  to  patriarchal  age.  As  time  went  on,  the 
habits  of  his  life  changed  almost  imperceptibly.  The  cir- 
cuit of  his  walks  grew  narrower;  his  visits  to  London 
and  elsewhere  less  frequent.  His  friends  of  the  younger 
generation,  Dickens  and  Forster  especially,  and  without 
fail,  were  accustomed  every  year  to  run  down  to  Bath 
and  bear  him  company  on  his  birthday,  the  30th  of  Janu- 
ary. Carlyle,  whose  temper  of  hero-worship  found  much 
that  was  congenial  in  Landor's  writings,  and  who  delight- 
ed in  the  sterling  and  vigorous  qualities  of  the  man,  once 
made  the  same  journey  in  order  to  visit  him.  I  do  not 
know  whether  the  invitation  was  ever  accepted  which 
Landor  addressed  to  another  illustrous  junior  in  the  fol- 
lowing scrap  of  friendly  doggrel : 

"  I  entreat  you,  Alfred  Tennyson, 
Come  and  share  my  haunch  of  venison. 
I  have  too  a  bin  of  claret, 
Good,  but  better  when  you  share  it. 
Tho'  'tis  only  a  small  bin, 
There's  a  stock  of  it  within ; 
And,  as  sure  as  I'm  a  rhymer, 
Half  a  butt  of  Rudesheimer. 
Come ;  among  the  sons  of  men  is  one 
Welcomer  than  Alfred  Tennyson?" 

With  several  of  the  younger  poets  and  men  of  letters  of 


Til.]  LITE  AT  BATH.  181 

those  days  Landor's  prompt  and  cordial  recognition  of 
literary  excellence  had  put  him  on  terras  of  the  friendliest 
correspondence  and  regard.  But  his  friends  of  his  own 
standing  were  beginning  to  fall  about  him  fast. 

"  We  hurry  to  the  river  we  must  cross, 

And  swifter  downward  every  footstep  wends ; 
Happy  who  reach  it  ere  they  count  the  loss 
Of  half  their  faculties  and  half  their  friends." 

Thus  Landor  had  written  in  his  ode  to  Southey  in  1833. 
Six  years  later  Southey's  mind  had  suddenly  given  way, 
and  in  1843  he  died,  the  name  of  Landor  having  been  one 
of  the  last  upon  his  lips  while  a  glimmering  of  conscious- 
ness remained  to  him.  Of  the  various  tributes  to  his 
memory  which  Landor  wrote  at  the  time,  that  in  the  form 
of  a  vision,  beginning 

"It  was  a  dream,  ah !  what  is  not  a  dream ?" 

is  conspicuous  for  its  beauty,  singularity,  and  tenderness. 
Francis  Hare  had  died  in  middle  age  at  Palermo  three 
years  earlier.  Landor's  next  great  loss  was  that  of  his 
dear  friend  and  loyal  admirer  Ablett,  who  died  in  1848. 
Within  two  years  followed  the  death  of  Landor's  brother 
Charles,  and  almost  at  the  same  time  that  of  Lady  Bles- 
sington.  The  long-impending  crash  had  at  last  overtaken 
the  establishment  in  Gore  House;  the  house  itself  had 
been  sold  with  all  its  contents  and  adjacencies;  Count 
D'Orsay  had  followed  the  fortunes  of  Louis  Napoleon  to 
France,  whither  Lady  Blessington  soon  went  also,  and 
where  she  died  in  1850  at  St.  Germain.  Again  Landor 
has  commemorated  his  affection  and  his  sense  of  his  loss 
in  his  best  vein  of  graceful  and  meditative  verse.  It  had 
been  one  of  Landor's  great  consolations  during  a  portion 


282  LANDOR.  [chap. 

of  his  life  at  Bath  that  Madame  de  Molande  had  been  liv- 
ing in  that  city  with  her  grandchildren.  In  August,  1851, 
she  too  died  in  France.  It  was  just  forty-five  years  since 
he  had  written  his  lament  for  the  necessity  which  forced 
them  to  part  in  the  days  of  their  early  passion : 

"  lanth^,  thou  art  called  across  the  sea, 
A  path  forbidden  me .'" 

Let  us  quote  in  this  connexion,  not  any  of  the  commem- 
orative lines  which  Landor  wrote  on  receiving  the  news 
of  her  death,  but  rather  those  other  verses  of  grave  self- 
confidence  and  assured  appeal  to  the  ages  with  which,  it 
does  not  appear  precisely  at  what  date,  he  set  a  fitting  and 
final  seal  on  the  poetry  referring  to  this  episode  of  his 

life. 

"  Well  I  remember  how  you  smiled 

To  see  me  write  your  name  upon 

The  soft  sea-sand.  .  .  .  0  what  a  child! 

You  think  yonCre  writing  upon  stone  / 

"  I  have  since  written  what  no  tide 
Shall  ever  wash  away,  what  men 
Unborn  shall  read  o'er  ocean  wide, 
And  find  lanth^'s  name  again." 

All  these  deaths  would  naturally  have  prepared  Lan- 
der's mind  for  his  own,  had  he  stood  in  need  of  such 
preparation.  But  he  had  long  faced  that  contingency 
with  the  same  composure  with  which  others  are  encour- 
aged to  face  it  in  so  many  of  his  tender  and  heroic  ad- 
monitions. Of  each  successive  birthday  as  it  came  round 
he  felt  as  though  it  might  naturally  be  his  last.  It  was 
on  the  morning  after  his  seventy -fifth  that  he  wrote  and 
read  aloud  before  breakfast  those  lines  which  he  after- 
wards prefixed  to  the  volume  called  Last  Fruit : 


Til.]  LIFE  AT  BATH.  183 

"  I  strove  with  none,  for  none  was  worth  my  strife : 
Nature  I  loved,  and,  next  to  nature.  Art ; 
I  warmed  both  hands  before  the  fire  of  life ; 
It  sinks,  and  I  am  ready  to  depart." 

Infinitely  touching  seemed  his  dignified,  resigned  air  and 
beautiful  manly  voice  to  the  girlish  friend  whom  he  at 
this  time  called  daughter,  and  who  was  standing  by  as  he 
read ;  and  when  he  saw  how  he  had  brought  the  tears 
into  her  eyes,  the  old  man  came  across  and  patted  her 
shoulder,  saying,  "  My  good  child !  I  really  think  you 
love  your  father  almost  as  well  as  Pomero  does."  But 
the  summons  to  depart  was  destined  to  come  to  many  an- 
other yet  of  those  dear  to  Landor  before  it  came  to  him- 
self. Within  three  years  after  the  losses  last  mentioned, 
there  followed  those  of  his  sister  Elizabeth  and  of  his 
ever-faithful  friend,  the  accomplished  and  pure -hearted 
Julius  Hare.  By  his  lips,  as  by  Southey's,  Landor's  was 
one  of  the  last  names  ever  spoken.  Next  went  Kenyon ; 
and  next,  having  lived  beyond  the  common  age  of  his 
kind,  died  Pomero,  leaving  the  daily  footsteps  of  the  old 
man  more  alone  than  ever. 

But  it  is  time  that  we  should  go  back,  and  acquaint 
ourselves  with  the  nature  of  the  work  in  literature  which 
Landor  had  been  doing  during  this  long  autumn  of  his 
life  in  England.  His  whole  literary  career  may  best,  I 
think,  be  divided  into  three  periods — the  first  of  twenty- 
six  years,  from  1795  to  1821 ;  the  second  of  sixteen,  from 
1821  to  1837;  and  the  third,  incredible  as  it  sounds, 
again  of  twenty-six,  from  1837  to  1863.  The  first  period, 
as  we  have  seen,  was  one  of  experiment  only  partially  fe- 
licitous ;  experiment  chiefly  in  the  highest  kinds  of  poetry 
and  in  the  serious  employment  of  Latin  for  the  purposes 
of  original  modern  writing ;  its  principal  achievements  are 


184  LANDOR.  [chap. 

Gebir^  Count  Julian,  and  the  Idyllia  Heroica.  The  sec- 
ond period,  from  1821  to  1837,  that  is  from  Lander's 
forty-sixth  year  to  his  sixty-second,  is  the  period  of  his 
central  and  greatest  work,  consisting  chiefly  of  dramatic 
or  quasi-dramatic  writings  in  prose ;  its  principal  achieve- 
ments are  the  Imaginary  Conversations,  the  Examination 
of  Shahspeare,  Pericles  and  Aspasia,  and  the  Pentameron. 
The  third  period,  upon  which  we  have  now  entered,  in- 
cludes all  the  rest  of  Landor's  life,  from  his  sixty-second 
year  to  his  eighty-eighth  (1837 — 1863),  and  is  one  of  mis- 
cellaneous production  in  many  kinds  of  writing,  with  a 
preponderance,  on  the  whole,  of  verse.  From  composition 
in  one  form  or  another  Landor  never  rested  long.  He 
declared  over  and  over  again  his  unalterable  resolution  to 
give  up  writing,  sometimes  in  a  fit  of  disgust,  sometimes 
lest  as  he  grew  older  his  powers  should  fail  him  unawares. 
But  such  resolutions  were  no  sooner  made  than  broken. 
He  worked  now  to  satisfy  his  own  impulse,  now  to  please 
a  friend  who  was  also  an  editor.  In  all  his  literary  under- 
takings throughout  this  third  period  he  was  in  the  habit 
of  acting  on  the  advice  and  with  the  help  of  Mr.  Forster ; 
advice  generally  discreet,  and  help  at  all  times  ungrudg- 
inof.  The  misfortune  is  that  this  most  unselfish  of  friends 
should  have  proved  also  the  least  self-forgetful  of  biogra- 
phers, and  the  least  capable  of  keeping  his  own  services  in 
the  background. 

Landor's  first  important  publication  during  the  Bath 
period  was  in  the  form  of  dramatic  verse.  Being  laid  up 
with  a  sprained  ancle,  he  occupied  himself  with  compos- 
ing first  one  play  and  then  another  on  the  story  of  Gio- 
vanna  of  Naples.  In  reality  that  story  is  as  dark  with 
crime  and  uncertainty,  and  as  lightning-lit  with  flashes  of 
romance,  and  with  the  spell  of  beauty  accused  yet  wor* 


VII.]  DRAMAS.  185 

shipped,  as  is  the  story  of  Mary  Queen  of  Scots  herself. 
Lacdor's  version  of  it  corresponds  to  none  that  vi'ill  be 
found  in  histories.  "  I  am  a  horrible  confounder  of  his- 
torical facts,"  he  writes.  "  I  have  usually  one  history  that 
I  have  read,  and  another  that  I  have  invented."  It  was 
like  his  chivalry  that  he,  as  a  matter  of  course,  took  the 
favourable  view  of  the  queen's  character,  and  like  his 
hatred  of  the  Romish  priesthood  that  he  made  the  court 
confessor,  Fra  Rupert,  the  villain  of  his  plot  and  the  con- 
triver of  the  murder  of  the  queen's  husband.  The  first 
of  his  two  plays  Landor  named  after  the  victim  of  the 
murder,  Andrea  of  Hungary ;  the  second  after  the  queen 
herself.  The  volume  appeared  in  1839,  with  a  prologue 
in  verse  addressed  to  his  young  friend  "  Rose,"  and  an  in- 
timation that  the  profits  of  the  sale  were  intended  to  be 
handed  over  to  Grace  Darling.  From  first  to  last  it  was 
Landor's  habit  thus  to  destine  to  some  charitable  object 
the  profits  which  in  perfect  good  faith,  and  in  defiance  of 
reiterated  experience,  his  imagination  invariably  anticipated 
from  the  sale  of  his  works. 

Within  a  couple  of  years  Landor  had  written  and  pub- 
lished separately  yet  another  play,  which  completed  this 
Neapolitan  trilogy,  and  which  he  called  after  the  name  of 
the  villain  Fra  Rupert.  The  scenes  of  this  trilogy  are  as 
deficient  in  sustained  construction  and  dramatic  sequence 
as  Count  Julian  itself.  They  are  pitched  in  a  lower  key, 
and  written  with  more  variety  of  style,  than  that  unmiti- 
gated and  Titanic  tragedy.  The  character  of  the  young 
king,  with  his  boorish  training  and  his  chivalrous  nature, 
from  the  neglected  soil  of  which  all  the  latent  virtues  are 
drawn  forth  by  the  loving  wisdom  of  Giovanna,  is  a  new 
conception  excellently  worked  out.  The  figure  of  Fra  Ru- 
pert, on  the  other  hand,  and  that  of  Rienzi,  seem  to  me 
N     9 


186  LANDOR.  [chap, 

types  somewhat  boyish  and  overcharged,  the  one  of  brutal 
coarseness  and  brutal  craft,  the  other  of  the  demoralization 
consequent  upon  the  exercise  of  unlimited  power.  Among 
the  feminine  personages  we  find,  as  always  in  the  work 
of  Landor,  the  most  beautifully  conceived  traits  of  great- 
hearted sweetness  and  devotion  ;  varied,  however,  in  light- 
er moments  with  others  like  the  following : 

"  Any  one  now  would  say  you  thought  me  handsome," 

exclaims  Fiammetta  to  Boccaccio ;  a  royal  princess,  be  it 
remembered,  to  a  clerkly  and  courtly  poet.  Taken  as  col- 
lections of  separate  scenes,  these  plays,  unsatisfactory  as 
plays,  are  full  of  fine  feeling,  and  of  solid  activity  and  m- 
genuity  of  conception.  A  curious  point  in  relation  to  the 
second  of  the  three  is  that  it  bears  in  some  points  of  plot 
and  situation  a  remarkably  close  resemblance  to  a  tragedy 
on  the  same  subject  published  anonymously  fifteen  years 
before,  under  the  title  of  Count  Arezzi.  This  piece  when 
it  appeared  had  by  some  been  taken  for  the  work  of  By- 
ron, and  for  a  few  days  had  been  on  that  account  in  much 
demand.  Its  real  author  had  been  no  other  than  Landor's 
own  brother  Robert.  When  the  resemblance  was  brought 
to  Walter  Landor's  notice  he  seemed  utterly  unable  to  ac- 
count for  it,  having  to  the  best  of  his  knowledge  never 
either  seen  or  heard  of  Count  Arezzi.  But  he  was  subject 
to  forgetfulness  equally  complete  when,  after  the  lapse  of 
a  few  years,  passages  of  his  own  writing  were  recited  to 
him;  and  the  impression  retained  by  Mr.  Robert  Landor 
was  that  his  brother  must  have  read  his  play  when  it  first 
appeared,  and,  forgetting  the  fact  afterwards,  preserved 
portions  of  it  in  his  mind  by  an  act  of  purely  unconscious 
recollection.  In  conduct  and  construction,  indeed,  the 
plays  written  by  Robert  Landor  are  better  than  any  b^ 


TII.J  DRAMAS.  187 

his  illustrious  brother.  There  was  much  in  common  be- 
tween the  two  men.  Robert  Landor  had  nearly  every- 
thing of  Walter  except  the  passionate  energy  of  his  tem- 
perament and  his  genius.  He  was  an  admirable  scholar, 
and  in  his  dramas  of  Count  Arezzi,  The  Earl  of  Brecon, 
Faith's  Fraud,  and  The  Ferryman,  and  his  didactic  ro- 
mances, The  Fountain  of  Arethusa  and  the  Fawn  of  Ser- 
torius,  he  shows  himself  master  of  a  sound  English  style 
and  a  pure  and  vigorous  vein  of  feeling  and  invention. 
Personally,  he  was  the  prince  of  gentlemen ;  of  a  notably 
fine  presence,  taller  than  his  eldest  brother,  and  of  equally 
distinguished  bearing,  without  his  brother's  irascibilities. 
He  had  the  same  taste  for  seclusion,  and  lived  almost  un- 
known at  his  beautiful  rectory  of  Birlingham,  contented 
with  his  modest  private  fortune,  and  spending  on  charity 
the  entire  income  of  his  living.  After  the  brothers  had 
parted  in  1816  at  Como,  a  coldness  had  arisen  between 
them,  and  it  was  only  now,  when  the  elder  had  returned  to 
England,  that  they  were  again  on  the  old  terms  of  mutual 
affection  and  respect. 

Soon  after  this  trilogy  it  would  appear  that  Landor 
wrote  the  last  of  his  complete  plays,  the  Siege  of  Ancona. 
This  subject,  with  its  high-pitched  heroisms,  its  patriotisms 
and  invincibilities,  suited  Landor  well,  and  the  play,  al- 
though the  least  noticed  by  his  critics,  is  I  think,  upon 
the  whole,  his  best.  I  do  not  know  whether  it  was  of  these 
four  dramas,  and  of  Count  Julian  in  especial,  or  of  all  Lan- 
dor's  dramatic  and  quasi-dramatic  writings  together,  that 
Mr.  Browning  was  thinking  when,  a  few  years  later,  he 
dedicated  to  Landor,  as  *'  a  great  dramatic  poet,"  the  vol- 
ume containing  his  own  two  plays  of  Luria  and  the  SouVs 
Tragedy.  The  letter  written  by  the  elder  poet  in  acknowl- 
edgment of  this  tribute  from  the  younger  is  so  character- 
36 


188  LANDOR.  [chap. 

istic  alike  of  his  genial  friendliness  to  his  brother  authors, 
and  of  the  broad  and  manly  justice  of  his  habitual  criti- 
cisms both  on  himself  and  others,  that  I  cannot  deny  my- 
self the  pleasure  of  quoting  it : 

"  Accept  my  thanks  for  the  richest  of  Easter  offerings  made  to  any 
one  for  many  years.  I  staid  at  home  last  evening  on  purpose  to 
read  Liiria,  and  if  I  lost  any  good  music  (as  I  certainly  did)  I  was 
well  compensated  in  kind.  To-day  I  intend  to  devote  the  rainy 
hours  entirely  to  The  SouVs  Tragedy.  I  wonder  whether  I  shall  find 
it  as  excellent  as  Inirxa.  You  have  conferred  too  high  a  distinction 
on  me  in  your  graceful  inscription.  I  am  more  of  a  dramatist  in 
prose  than  in  poetry.  My  imagination,  like  my  heart,  has  always 
been  with  the  women,  I  mean  the  young,  for  I  cannot  separate 
that  adjective  from  that  substantive.  This  has  taught  me  above 
all  things  the  immeasurable  superiority  of  Shakspeare.  His  women 
raise  him  to  it.  I  mean  the  immensity  of  the  superiority  ;  the  supe- 
riority would  exist  without.  I  am  sometimes  ready  to  shed  tears  at 
his  degradation  in  Comedy.  I  would  almost  have  given  the  first 
joint  of  my  fore-finger  rather  than  he  should  have  written,  for  in- 
stance, such  trash  as  that  in  the  Two  Ge7itlemen  of  Verorm.  His 
wit  is  pounded,  and  spiced,  and  potted,  and  covered  with  rancidity 
at  last.  A  glass  of  champagne  at  Moliere's  is  very  refreshing  af- 
ter this  British  spirit.  Go  on  and  pass  us  poor  devils !  If  you  do 
not  go  far  ahead  of  me,  I  will  crack  my  whip  at  you  and  make  you 
spring  forward.     So,  to  use  a  phrase  of  Queen  Ehzabe^, 

" '  Yours  as  you  demean  yourself,' 

"  W.  Landor." 

Returning  to  the  years  1839-42,  Landor  in  this  inter- 
val, besides  his  trilogy  of  plays,  published  in  Mr.  Forster's 
review,  and  at  his  request.  Criticisms,  in  his  ripest  and 
soundest  vein,  on  Theocritus,  Catullus,  and  Petrarch ;  and 
by  the  advice  of  the  same  friend  withheld  from  publication 
a  reply  to  an  adverse  review  of  the  Pentameron  which  he 
at  the  time,  apparently  in  error,  attributed  to  Hallam.  In 
this  reply  Landor  had  both  defended  and  supplemented 


VII.]  COLLECTED  WORKS.  189 

the  view  of  Dante  which  he  had  put  forward  in  the  De- 
cameron, and  had  in  his  grandest  manner  set  forth  what 
he  conceived  to  be  the  qualifications  necessary  for  the 
right  appreciation  of  that  master  : 

"  Mr.  Landor  has  no  more  questioned  the  sublimity  or  the  profound- 
ness of  Dante,  than  his  readers  will  question  whether  he  or  his  critic 
is  the  more  competent  to  measure  them.  To  judge  properly  and 
comprehensively  of  Dante,  first  the  poetical  mind  is  requisite ;  then, 
patient  industry  in  exploring  the  works  of  his  contemporaries,  and 
in  going  back  occasionally  to  those  volumes  of  the  schoolmen  which 
lie  dormant  in  the  libraries  of  his  native  city.  Profitable  too  are  ex- 
cursions in  Val  d'Arno  and  Val  d'Elsa,  and  in  those  deep  recesses  of 
the  Apennines  where  the  elder  language  is  yet  abiding  in  its  rigid 
strength  and  fresh  austerity.  Twenty  years  and  unbroken  leisure 
have  afforded  to  Mr.  Landor  a  small  portion  of  such  advantages,  at 
least  of  the  latter ;  a  thousand  could  pour  none  effectually  into  his 
pertitsum  vas." 

In  the  three  or  four  years  following  the  production  of 
these  plays  and  criticisms  Landor  was  occupied  almost  en- 
tirely in  preparing  for  press,  with  the  indefatigable  help 
of  Mr.  Forster,  a  collected  edition  of  his  writings.  It  was 
in  1846  that  this  edition  at  length  appeared.  It  contain- 
ed the  whole  mass  of  Landor's  work  compressed  into  two 
tall  volumes  in  royal  octavo,  with  the  text  printed  in 
double  columns;  an  unattractive  and  inconvenient  ar- 
rangement. The  principal  novelties  in  the  collection  were, 
first,  the  supplementary  Conversations  recovered  from  the 
light-hearted  custody  of  Mr.  Willis,  together  with  others 
written  during  the  last  fifteen  years,  forty-two  in  all ;  and 
next  the  Hellenics;  consisting  of  translations  into  Eng- 
lish blank  verse,  undertaken  in  the  first  instance  at  the  sug- 
gestion of  Lady  Blessington,  of  those  Idyllia  of  Landor's 
in  Latin  the  first  edition  of  which  had  been  printed  at  Ox- 
ford in  1814,  and  the  second  at  Pisa  in  1820;   together 


190  LANDOR.  [chap. 

with  some  others  written  originally  in  English,  The  ded- 
ications of  the  original  Conversations  were  not  reprinted, 
several  of  the  patriots  and  liberators  to  whom  they  were 
addressed  having  in  the  interval  precipitated  themselves,  in 
Landor's  esteem,  from  the  pinnacle  of  glory  to  the  abyss 
of  shame.  To  the  two  volumes  was  prefixed  instead  a 
brief  inscription  addressed  in  terras  of  grateful  affection 
to  Julius  Hare  and  John  Forster ;  to  the  latter  of  whom  a 
second  address  in  verse  brought  the  book  to  a  close. 

So  vast  and  so  diversified  a  mass  of  energetic  thinking 
and  masterly  writing  it  would  within  the  compass  of  any 
other  two  volumes  be  hard  to  find.  But  one  whole  class 
of  Landor's  work,  and  his  own  favourite  class,  had  found 
no  place  in  them — I  mean  his  work  in  Latin — and  accord- 
ingly he  next  set  about  collecting,  correcting,  and  in  part 
rewriting  bis  productions  in  that  language,  both  prose  and 
verse.  By  dint  of  infinite  pains  and  zeal  on  his  own  part, 
and  on  that  of  Mr.  Forster,  this  final  edition  of  his  Latin 
writings  was  got  through  the  press  in  1847,  in  the  shape 
of  a  small  closely  printed  volume  called  Poemata  et  In- 
scriptiones.  In  the  meantime  a  few  lovers  of  poetry  had 
been  much  struck  by  the  choice  and  singular  quality  of 
the  Hellenics.  Landor  was  encouraged  to  reprint  these 
poems  separately,  and  in  the  course  of  this  same  year 
they  were  issued  by  the  house  of  Moxon,  with  additions 
and  revisions,  in  one  of  those  small  volumes  in  green  cloth 
which  the  muse  of  Mr.  Tennyson  has  so  long  made  wel- 
come and  familiar  to  our  eyes. 

The  massive  individuality  of  Landor's  mind  was  accom- 
panied, as  we  have  seen,  by  a  many-sided  power  of  histor- 
ical sympathy,  which  made  him  at  home  not  in  one  only 
but  in  several,  and  those  the  most  dissimilar,  ages  of  the 
past.     The  strenuous  gravity  and  heroic  independence  of 


VII.]  HELLENICS.  191 

Puritan  England  had  entered  into  Lis  imaginative  being, 
as  well  as  the  contented  grace  and  harmonious  self-posses- 
sion of  ancient  Hellas.  But  of  all  things  he  was  perhaps 
the  most  of  a  Greek  at  heart.  His  freedom  from  any 
tincture  of  mysticism,  his  love  of  unconfused  shapes  and 
outlines,  his  easy  dismissal  of  the  unfathomable  and  the 
unknown,  and  steady  concentration  of  the  mind  upon  the 
purely  human  facts  of  existence,  its  natural  sorrows  and 
natural  consolations,  all  helped  him  to  find  in  the  life  of 
ancient  Greece  a  charm  without  alloy,  and  in  her  songs 
and  her  philosophies  a  beauty  and  a  wisdom  without  short- 
coming. Adequate  scholarship,  and  a  close  literary  famil- 
iarity with  the  Greek  writers,  fortified  this  natural  sym- 
pathy with  the  knowledge  which  was  wanting  to  Keats, 
whose  flashes  of  luminous  and  enraptured  insight  into 
things  Hellenic  are  for  want  of  such 'knowledge  lacking 
in  coherency  and  in  assurance.  Landor  on  his  part  is 
without  Keats's  gift,  the  born  poet's  gift,  of  creative,  un- 
taught felicity  in  epithet  and  language ;  his  power  over 
language  is  of  another  kind,  more  systematic,  trained, 
and  regular.  But  in  dealing  with  things  Hellenic  Landor 
strikes  generally  with  complete  assurance  the  true  imagina- 
tive note.  This  is  equally  the  case  whether,  as  in  Pericles 
and  Aspasia,  and  in  his  dialogues  of  ancient  philosophers 
and  statesmen,  he  makes  the  Greeks  themselves  extol  the 
glories  of  their  race,  or  whether  he  trusts  the  exposition 
of  those  glories  in  the  mouths  of  modern  speakers,  as 
when  Michelangelo  is  made  to  remind  Vittoria  Colonna 
of  the  conquests  of  the  race  in  war  and  art,  of  Salamis  and 
the  Prometheus  of  ^schylus,  together : 

"  The  conquerors  of  kings  until  then  omnipotent,  kings  who  had 
trampled  on  the  towers  of  Babylon  and  had  shaken  the  eternal  sanc- 
tuaries of  Thebes,  the  conquerors  of  those  kings  bowed  their  olive- 


192  LANDOR.  '  [chap. 

crowned  heads  to  the  sceptre  of  Destiny,  and  their  tears  flowed  pro- 
fusely over  the  immeasurable  wilderness  of  human  woes." 

Hear,  again,  how  Alfieri  is  made  to  correct  the  false  taste 
of  another  Italian  poet  in  his  description  of  Pluto,  and  to 
draw  in  its  place  the  true  Greek  picture  of  that  god  and 
of  his  kingdom : 

"  Does  this  describe  the  brother  of  Jupiter  ?  does  it  not  rather  the 
devils  of  our  carneval,  than  him  at  whose  side,  upon  asphodel  and 
amaranth,  the  sweet  Persephone  sits  pensively  contented,  in  that 
deep  motionless  quiet  which  mortals  pity  and  which  the  gods  enjoy, 
than  him  who,  under  the  umbrage  of  Elysium,  gazes  at  once  upon 
all  the  beauties  that  on  earth  were  separated  by  times  and  countries 
.  .  .  Helena  and  Eriphyle,  Polyxena  and  Hermione,  Deidamia  and  Dei- 
anira,  Leda  and  Omphale,  Atalanta  and  Cydippe,  Laodamia,  with  her 
arm  around  the  neck  of  a  fond  youth,  whom  she  still  seems  afraid  of 
losing,  and  apart,  the  daughters  of  Niobe,  though  now  in  smiles,  still 
clinging  to  their  parent ;  and  many  thousands  more,  each  of  whom  is 
worth  the  dominions,  once  envied,  of  both  brothers  ?" 

Landor  was  a  less  accomplished  master  in  verse  than 
prose ;  and  we  hardly  find  in  the  Hellenics  anything  equal 
to  the  lovely  interlinked  cadences,  and  the  assured  imao-- 
inative  ease  and  justice,  of  passages  like  this.  What  we 
do  find  is  an  extreme,  sometimes  an  excessive,  simplicity 
and  reserve  both  of  rhythm  and  language,  conveying,  in 
many  instances  at  least,  a  delightful  succession  of  classical 
images — images  not  only  lucid  in  themselves,  but  more  lu- 
cidly and  intelligibly  connected  than  had  been  Landor's 
wont  in  his  earher  narrative  poetry.  The  Hamadryad 
and  its  sequel,  ^cow  and  Rliodope,  of  which  no  Latin  orig- 
inal had  been  first  composed,  these  with  Enallos  and  Cy- 
modameia  are,  I  think,  the  choicest  examples  of  the  vein ; 
one  or  two  of  the  others,  such  as  the  Altar  of  Modesty, 
had  better  have  been  left  in  their  original  Latin.     The 


711.]  HELLENICS.  193 

gem,  however,  of  the  volume,  is  to  my  mind  not  any  one 
of  mythologic  tales  or  idyls,  but  the  following  brief,  ex- 
quisitely wrought  scene  of  household  mourning.  The 
husband,  Elpenor,  stands  by  the  bedside  of  the  wife,  Ar- 
temidora,  and  speaks : 

" '  Artemidora  !     Gods  invisible, 

While  thou  wert  lying  faint  along  the  couch, 

Have  tied  the  sandals  to  thy  slender  feet, 
And  stand  beside  thee,  ready  to  convey 

Thy  weary  steps  where  other  rivers  flow. 
Refreshing  shades  will  waft  thy  weariness 
Away,  and  voices  like  thy  own  come  near 
And  nearer,  and  solicit  an  embrace.' 

Artemidora  sigh'd,  and  would  have  prest 
The  hand  now  pressing  hers,  but  was  too  weak. 
Iris  stood  over  her  dark  hair  unseen 
While  thus  Elpenor  spake.     He  lookt  into 
Eyes  that  had  given  light  and  life  erewhile 
To  those  above  them,  but  now  dim  with  tears 
And  wakefulness.     Again  he  spake  of  joy 
Eternal.     At  that  word,  that  sad  word,  joi/, 
Faithful  and  fond  her  bosom  heaved  once  more ; 
Her  head  fell  back  :  and  now  a  loud  deep  sob 
SweU'd  through  the  darken'd  chamber ;  'twas  not  hers." 

Landor  can  never  have  seen  those  beautiful  and  character- 
istic worts  of  Attic  sculpture,  the  funeral  monuments  in 
which  the  death  of  the  beloved  is  shadowed  forth  in  a 
group  representing,  only  with  a  touch  of  added  solemnity 
in  the  expressions,  his  or  her  preparations  for  departure 
upon  an  ordinary  journey  or  an  ordinary  day's  work.  But 
his  poem  is  conceived  in  the  very  spirit  of  those  sculptures. 
Like  all  his  best  work,  it  has  to  be  read  repeatedly  and 
slowly  before  it  will  be  found  to  have  yielded  up  the  full 
depth  and  tenderness  of  its  meanings.  The  beauty  of  the 
dying  woman  implied,  not  described ;  the  gentle  dealings 
9* 


194  LANDOR.  [chap. 

with  her  of  the  unseen  messenger  of  the  gods  who  has 
placed  the  sandals  about  her  feet  in  sleep ;  the  solicitude 
of  the  husband,  who  as  long  as  she  breathes  will  speak  to 
her  only  words  of  comfort ;  his  worship,  which,  when  he 
would  tell  her  of  the  voices  that  will  greet  her  beyond  the 
tomb,  can  find  no  words  to  express  their  sweetness  except 
by  calling  them  "like  her  own;"  the  pressure  with  which 
she  would,  but  cannot,  answer  him ;  the  quiver  of  the  heart 
with  which  she  expires  upon  the  mention  and  the  idea  of 
joy — for  what  are  those  unknown  and  uncompanioned  joys 
to  her  ? — the  bursting  of  the  floodgates  of  his  grief  when 
there  is  no  longer  any  reason  for  restraining  it ;  these  things 
are  conceived  with  that  depth  and  chastity  of  tenderness, 
that  instinctive  beauty  in  pathos,  which  Landor  shares  with 
none  but  the  greatest  masters  of  the  human  heart.  If  we 
are  to  let  ourselves  notice  the  presence  of  imperfections 
or  mannerisms  in  so  beautiful  a  piece  of  work  and  of  feel- 
ing, it  will  be  to  point  out  the  mode  (habitual  with  Lan- 
dor) in  which  the  pronouns  are  made  to  do  more  work 
than  they  can  well  bear  in  the  words  "  those  above  them  ;" 
meaning  the  eyes  of  Elpenor,  now,  at  the  moment  of  the 
description,  occupying  a  position  above  those  of  his  wife, 
inasmuch  as  she  is  lying  on  the  sick-bed  and  he  standing 
over  her.  This  is  an  instance  of  Landor's  habit  of  exces- 
sive condensation  ;  just  as  the  last  lines  contain  an  instance 
of  his  habit  of  needlessly  avoiding,  in  narrative,  the  main 
fact  of  a  situation,  and  relating  instead  some  result  or  con- 
comitant of  the  situation  from  which  the  reader  is  required 
to  infer  its  main  fact  for  himself. 

To  this  1847  edition  of  the  Hellenics  Landor  prefixed 
a  dedication  in  capital  letters,  which  is  a  monument  at 
once  of  the  magnificence  of  his  prose  style  and  of  the 
sanguine  political  enthusiasm  which   remained  proof  in 


Tn.]  HELLENICS.  195 

him  against  every  disencliantmcnt.  The  liberal  Cardinal 
Mastai  had  just  been  elected  Pope  as  Pio  Nouo,  and  for 
a  moment  the  eyes  of  all  Europe  were  turned  in  hope  to- 
wards the  new  pontiff.  To  him,  accordingly,  Landor  in- 
scribed his  book.  After  a  contrast  of  his  opportunities 
and  his  purposes  with  those  of  Louis  Philippe,  the  inscrip- 
tion concludes : 

"  Cunning  is  not  wisdom ;  prevarication  is  not  policy ;  and  (novel 
as  the  notion  is,  it  is  equally  true)  armies  are  not  strength :  Acre  and 
Waterloo  show  it,  and  the  flames  of  the  Kremlin  and  the  solitudes 
of  Fontainbleau.  One  honest  man,  one  wise  man,  one  peaceful  man, 
commands  a  hundred  millions  without  a  baton  and  without  a  charger. 
He  wants  no  fortress  to  protect  him  :  he  stands  higher  than  any 
citadel  can  raise  him,  brightly  conspicuous  to  the  most  distant  na- 
tions, God's  servant  by  election,  God's  image  by  beneficence." 

The  events  of  the  next  few  years  revived  in  Landor  all 
the  emotions  of  his  earlier  manhood.  The  year  1848 
seemed  to  him  like  another  and  more  hopeful  year  1821. 
The  principles  of  popular  government  and  of  despotism 
once  more  encountered  each  other  in  the  death-grapple. 
The  struggle  was  sharper  than  the  last  had  been  ;  a  greater 
number  of  tyrannies  reeled  and  tottered,  and  for  a  longer 
time ;  but  the  final  defeat  was,  at  least  it  seemed  to  be, 
not  less  crushing,  nor  the  final  disappointment  less  com- 
plete. Against  the  renegadoes  of  liberty,  such  as  the  Pope 
himself  and  Louis  Napoleon,  there  were  no  bounds  to 
Landor's  indignation.  By  the  abilities  and  friendliness  of 
the  latter  he  had  been,  in  personal  intercourse  at  Gore 
House,  quite  won,  and  foreseeing  after  the  revolution  of 
1848  that  he  would  soon  be  called  to  the  absolute  govern- 
ment of  his  country,  was  nevertheless  inclined  to  believe 
in  his  integrity  of  purpose.  But  the  first  shot  fired  against 
republican  Rome  in  the  name  of  republican  France,  and 


196  LANDOR.  [chap. 

by  the  authority  of  her  President,  "  parted  us,"  as  Landor 
wrote,  "  for  ever,"  and  the  verses  in  which  Landor  by-and- 
by  denounced  the  refusal  of  the  right  of  asylum  to  Kossuth 
seem  by  their  concentrated  fire  of  scorn  and  indignation 
to  anticipate  the  Chdtiments  of  Victor  Hugo.  Kossuth, 
Manin,  Mazzini,  Garibaldi, .  Turr,  these,  and  especially 
Kossuth,  are  the  great  heroes  of  Landor's  admiration  now. 
He  wrote  a  small,  now  almost  undiscoverable,  volume  of 
Italics  in  verse,  besides  several  new  political  Conversations 
— of  Garibaldi  with  Mazzini ;  of  King  Carlo- Alberto  with 
the  Princess  Belgioioso ;  and  others  again  of  reactionary 
cardinals  and  ministers  with  each  other.  Even  after  the 
movement  of  1848  and  1849  had  been  for  the  time  being 
diverted  or  utterly  suppressed,  Landor  continued  to  be 
much  preoccupied  with  questions  of  policy  and  govern- 
ment. In  1851  he  published  a  series  of  letters  on  priest- 
craft and  ecclesiastical  organization,  entitled  Popery,  British 
and  Foreign,  and  about  the  same  time  a  series  of  ten  Let- 
ters to  Cardinal  Wiseman.  In  1854  the  approach  of  the 
Crimean  war  gave  rise  in  the  old  man,  now  in  his  eightieth 
year,  to  reflexions  on  the  necessity  of  curbing  the  power 
of  Russia;  on  the  possibility  of  reconstituting  the  king- 
dom of  Poland ;  and  on  the  sagacity  and  probable  achieve- 
ments of  Louis  Napoleon,  in  whom  he  for  a  short  time  ex- 
perienced a  brief  return  of  confidence.  These  reflexions 
he  cast  into  the  shape  of  Letters,  written  nominally  by  an 
American  travelling  in  England  to  a  friend  at  home,  and 
dedicated  to  Mr.  Gladstone,  with  the  words,  "Sir,  of  all 
whom  we  have  been  trusting,  you  alone  have  never  de- 
ceived us.  Together  with  the  confidence,  the  power  of 
England  is  in  your  hands.  May  those  hands,  for  the 
benefit  of  your  country  and  of  the  world,  be  as  strong  as 
they  are  pure." 


VII.]  POLITICAL  LETTERS.  197 

Three  years  later  Landor  addressed  to  Emerson  a  brief 
letter,  the  essence  of  proud  urbanity  and  compendious 
force,  in  which  he  rectified  several  of  that  writer's  observa- 
tions concerning  himself  in  the  English  Traits,  and  took 
occasion,  amidst  other  strokes  of  the  most  serene  auto- 
biographical candour,  to  state  exactly  his  sentiments  in 
regard  to  tyrannicide.  After  speaking  of  Alfieri,  Landor 
goes  on : 

"Had  he  been  living  in  these  latter  days,  his  bitterness  would 
have  overflowed  not  on  France  alone,  nor  Austria  in  addition,  the 
two  beasts  that  have  torn  Italy  in  pieces,  and  are  growling  over  her 
bones ;  but  more,  and  more  justly,  on  those  constitutional  govern- 
ments which,  by  abetting,  have  aided  them  in  their  ingrcssions  and 
incursions.  We  English  are  the  most  censurable  of  all.  .  .  .  The 
ministers  of  England  have  signed  that  Holy  Alliance  which  deUvered 
every  free  State  to  the  domination  of  arbitrary  and  irresponsible  des- 
pots. The  ministers  of  England  have  entered  more  recently  into 
treaties  with  usurpers  and  assassins.  And  now,  forsooth,  it  is  called 
assassination  to  remove  from  the  earth  an  assassin ;  the  assassin  of 
thousands  ;  an  outlaw,  the  subverter  of  his  country's,  and  even  of  his 
own,  laws.     The  valiant  and  the  wise  of  old  thought  differently." 

Backed  by  their  authority,  Landor  goes  on  to  contend 
that  tyrannicide  involves  less  misery  than  war,  and  to  ac- 
knowledge that  he  for  one  holds  and  ever  will  hold  that 
"  the  removal  of  an  evil  at  the  least  possible  cost  is  best." 
Some  time  before  this,  in  1853,  two  new  volumes  of 
Lar.dor's  writing  had  been  put  forth.  One  was  simply  a 
detached  reprint  of  those  of  his  imaginary  conversations 
in  which  the  speakers  were  ancient  Greeks  and  Romans : 
Conversations  of  the  Greeks  and  Romans  the  volume  was 
called,  and  its  dedication  to  Charles  Dickens,  in  which  he 
congratulates  his  friend  above  all  things  on  his  labours  "  in 
breaking  up  and  cultivating  the  unreclaimed  wastes  of  hu- 


198  LANDOR.  [chap. 

manity,"  is  another  example  of  the  combined  warmth  and 
heartiness  of  his  friendships  and  the  catholic  justice  of  his 
appreciations,  Landor's  second  volume  of  1853,  in  ap- 
pearance uniform  with  the  last-named,  was  called  by  him 
The  Last  Fruit  off  an  Old  Tree.  It  was  dedicated  to  the 
Marchese  d'Azeglio,  and  to  the  title-page  was  prefixed  that 
quatrain  of  Landor's  upon  his  seventy-fifty  birthday  which 
I  have  already  quoted  (p.  183).  It  contained  eighteen  new 
Conversations^  most  of  them  modern  and  political,  besides 
a  number  of  the  prose  pieces  published  during  the  past 
six  years  in  pamphlets  and  newspapers.  These  included, 
besides  the  pieces  of  which  mention  has  been  made  al- 
ready, an  evidence  of  Landor's  undecaying  feeling  towards 
the  memory  of  Southey,  in  the  shape  of  a  remonstrance 
addressed  to  Lord  Brougham  on  the  public  neglect  both 
of  that  memory  itself,  and  of  the  person  of  the  poet's  sur- 
viving son.  Of  himself  Landor  in  this  letter  gives  the 
monumental  and  just  description :  "  I  claim  no  place  in 
the  world  of  letters ;  I  am  alone,  and  will  be  alone,  as  long 
as  I  live,  and  after."  The  poetry  which  concludes  the  vol- 
ume of  Last  Fruit  is,  Landor  says,  what  I  wish  the  prose 
could  have  been,  mostly  panegyrical ;"  it  consists,  that  is 
to  say,  in  great  part,  of  "  epistles "  and  other  pieces  ad- 
dressed in  the  spirit  of  friendly  discussion  or  more  friendly 
praise  to  his  comrades  and  juniors  in  the  craft  of  letters. 
Last  of  all  came  five  detached  "  scenes "  in  verse  on  the 
subject  of  the  Cenci ;  scenes  written  not  in  rivalry,  still 
less  in  any  implied  depreciation,  of  the  work  of  Shelley, 
but  simply  taking  up  the  theme  afresh,  as  it  were  by  a 
different  handle  and  from  a  different  side. 

The  two  dramatic  dialoo-ues  in  Last  Fruit — those  of 
Leonora  di  Este,  the  beloved  of  Tasso,  with  Tasso's  con- 
fessor, and  of  Admiral  Blake  with  his  brother  Humphrey—' 


Til.]  LAST  FRUIT.  199 

are  among  the  finest  Landor  ever  wrote ;  the  modern  po- 
litical, whether  laudatory  or  satiric  in  their  purport,  are  for 
the  most  part  tedious  enough.  A  long  conversation  be- 
tween Landor  himself  and  Archdeacon  Hare,  represented 
as  taking  place  in  the  course  of  a  walk  at  Hurstmonceaux, 
is  the  ripest  and  most  interesting  of  that  class  which  be- 
gan thirty  years  before  with  the  first  dialogue  of  Johnson 
and  Home  Tooke.  The  discussion  turns  almost  entirely 
on  technical  points  of  English  literature  and  the  English 
language.  In  it,  among  other  things,  Landor  resumes,  de- 
fends, and  illustrates  those  principles  of  spelling  which  he 
had  founded  long  ago  on  analogy  and  on  the  study  of  the 
early  English  writers,  and  which  he  had  insisted  on  actual- 
ly putting  into  practice,  to  the  distraction  of  his  printers, 
in  a  large  proportion  of  his  published  writings.  Most  of 
his  readers  had  been  accustomed  to  regard  his  usage  in 
these  matters  as  mere  innovations  dictated  by  arbitrary 
whim.  Landor  showed  that  he  was  guided  not  by  whim 
but  by  principle,  and  denied  that  his  changes  were  innova- 
tions at  all.  He  knew  that  the  current  practice  of  any 
age  in  English  spelling  was  purely  a  matter  of  accident 
and  custom ;  and  to  the  accident  and  custom  of  his  own 
age  he  refused  to  bow  in  cases  where  he  found  those  of 
another  to  be  preferable.  He  drew  up  lists  of  those  words 
which  he  found  habitually  spelt  by  any  of  the  earlier 
writers,  from  Chaucer  down,  in  a  manner  more  consistent 
with  derivation,  with  sound,  or  with  analogy,  than  by  the 
moderns.  Thus  a  regard  to  derivation  made  him  write 
exclame,  proclame,  strategem,  instead  of  exclaim,  proclaim, 
stratagem  ;  a  regard  to  sound, /orew,  sovran,  interr,  instead 
of  foreign,  sovereign,  inter ;  to  analogy,  embassador,  or  else 
why  embassy  ?  receit,  or  else  why  deceit  and  conceit  ? 
grandor  or  grandour,  or  else  why  honour,  labour,  and  not 


200  LANDOR.  [chap. 

honneur,  labeur,  and  so  on  with  the  rest  ?  Fidelity  to  the 
spoken  sound  also  made  Landor  banish  the  termination  ed 
from  the  preterites  and  past  participles  of  verbs  ending 
with  sibilant,  or  soft  labial  or  guttural,  consonants,  and 
write  wisht,  dro2)t,  lookt,  instead  of  wished,  dropped, 
looked.  In  this  last  usage  Landor  was  followed  by  the 
brothers  Hare,  and  by  many  of  those  on  whom  the  Hares 
had  influence ;  including,  as  we  all  know,  no  less  a  mas- 
ter than  Mr.  Tennyson.  Custom,  reasonable  or  other,  has 
proved  too  strong  to  yield  to  others  of  Lander's  proposed 
reforms.  But  for  the  student  it  is  not  easy  to  find  better 
reading,  a  more  instructive  array  of  instances,  or  a  more 
pointed  and  clenching  method  of  presenting  arguments, 
than  are  contained  in  his  discussions  on  these  mechanical 
and  technical  matters  of  language.  Landor  hated  to  be 
confounded  with  the  so-called  phonetic  reformers  of  spell- 
ing, as  Hartley  Coleridge  first,  and  afterwards  one  or  two 
others,  had  confounded  him.  In  this  matter  as  in  others 
he  regarded  himself  essentially  as  a  conservative,  and  all 
he  proposed  was  to  select  for  imitation  and  revival  such 
portions  of  the  practice  of  the  best  writers,  from  the  four- 
teenth to  the  eighteenth  centuries,  as  seemed  on  examina- 
tion to  be  most  correct  and  rational.  From  the  orthog- 
raphy of  words  the  discussion  passes  on  to  the  words 
themselves,  and  we  find  Landor  inveighing  in  his  most 
vigorous  vein  against  the  colloquial  corruptions  which  he 
conceived  to  be  defiling  every  day  the  fountains  of  his 
mother  tongue.  "  Humbug  "  was  a  word  which  he  barely 
agreed  to  tolerate;  for  "pluck,"  "sham,"  "traps"  (mean- 
ing luggage),  "giant  trees,"  "monster  meetings,"  "palmy 
days,"  and  many  other  phrases  of  contemporary  slang  or 
contemporary  fine  writing,  he  had  no  toleration  whatever. 
He  felt  like  a  sentinel  keeping  guard  over  the  honour  and 


VII.]  LAST  FRUIT.  201 

integrity  of  the  English  language.  And  for  such  a  post 
no  man  was  better  fitted  either  by  knowledge  or  reflexion. 
So  massive  and  minute  a  literary  acquaintance  with  his 
mother  tongue,  combined  with  so  jealous  and  sensitive  an 
instinct  in  its  verbal  criticism,  have  probably  never  existed 
in  any  other  man.  Nor  was  there  ever  a  time  when  a  sen- 
tinel was  more  needed.  Even  men  of  genius  and  of  just 
popularity — a  Carlyle,  a  Dickens,  a  Macaulay — had  each  in 
his  way  accustomed  the  millions  of  English-speaking  and 
English-reading  men  to  find  their  language  forced  into  all 
manner  of  startling  or  glittering  usages,  of  extravagant  or 
unquiet  forms  and  devices.  There  were  few  writers,  and 
of  these  Landor  was  the  foremost,  who  adhered  to  a  clas- 
sical regularity  of  language  and  to  a  classical  composure 
and  restraint  of  style.  Landor  was  rigorous  in  rejecting 
from  his  vocabulary  all  words  but  such  as  had  stood  the 
test  of  time.  He  was  perhaps  the  most  exact  of  all  Eng- 
lish writers  in  observing  the  laws  of  logical  and  grammat- 
ical construction.  His  style  was  not  founded  on  that  of 
any  master,  but  included,  both  in  vocabulary  and  in  struct- 
ure, the  resources  of  all  the  best  English  prose  writers, 
from  Sir  Thomas  Browne  and  Milton  to  Horace  Walpole 
and  Lord  Chesterfield.  He  was  not  given,  except  for  spe- 
cial purposes,  to  the  use  of  strong  monosyllables,  or  of  the 
curt  Teutonic  English  which  has  been  brought  into  fash- 
ion in  our  own  time,  but  preferred  rather,  though  not  pe- 
dantically, the  polysyllabic  articulation  of  words  derived 
from  the  Latin. 

In  all  this,  however,  Landor  was  as  a  voice  crying  in  the 
wilderness.  It  is  amazing  now,  and  it  was  amazing  then, 
that  the  grand  old  preacher  should  have  so  few  listeners. 
The  English-reading  public  had  taken  him  at  his  word. 

They  left  him  where  he  was  content  to  remain,  alone. 
O 


202  LAJSTDOR.  [chap. 

They  gave  him  no  place  in  the  world  of  letters,  while  they 
excited  themselves  to  passion  over  the  work  of  scores  of 
lesser  men.  Less  attention  was  paid  to  him  in  England 
than  in  America,  where  about  this  time,  1856,  a  Selection 
of  detached  thoughts  and  sentences  from  the  Conversations 
was  published  at  Boston,  with  an  admirable  critical  intro- 
duction by  Mr.  Hilliard.  It  is  incredible,  but  true,  that 
within  three  years  of  the  publication  of  the  Last  Fruit  an 
elaborate  article  on  English  prose  style,  appearing  in  an 
English  magazine  to  which  Landor  was  himself  an  occa- 
sional contributor,  should  have  actually  contained  no  men- 
tion of  his  name  at  all.  This  neglect  did  not  trouble  him 
in  the  least,  nor  did  he  regard  with  a  shadow  of  envy  the 
applause  bestowed  on  others.  "Caring  not  a  straw  for 
popularity,  and  little  more  for  fame,"  he  simply  uttered 
from  time  to  time  the  thoughts  that  were  in  him  in  the 
language  which  he  found  most  fit.  From  a  few,  indeed,  of 
those  who  themselves  stood  nearest  him  in  power  and  art, 
every  such  utterance  as  it  appeared  drew  forth  a  fresh 
tribute  of  homage.  In  1856  Landor  published  in  a  sep- 
arate pamphlet  (the  "proceeds"  destined,  as  of  old,  to  a 
specified  purpose  of  charity)  a  set  of  Scenes  from  the 
Study — scenes  again  in  verse,  and  again  drawn  fearlessly 
from  a  domain  where  the  greatest  had  been  at  work  before 
him.  The  subject  was  Antony  and  Cleopatra.  "  What 
an  undaunted  soul  before  his  eighty  years,"  writes  Mrs. 
Browning,  after  reading  them,  "  and  how  good  for  all 
other  souls  to  contemplate !"  Still,  in  the  same  year,  he 
put  some  of  his  most  pregnant  thoughts  on  language,  and 
especially,  strange  as  it  may  seem,  on  the  English  language, 
into  a  dialogue  between  Alfieri  and  Metastasio,  published 
in  Fraser's  Magazine.  "  Do  you  think  the  grand  old  Pa- 
gan wrote  that  piece  just  now  ?"  asks  Carlyle,  in  a  letter 


Til.]  DRY  STICKS.  20.'? 

written  at  the  time.  "  The  sound  of  it  is  like  the  ring  of 
Roman  swords  on  the  helmets  of  barbarians  !  The  unsub- 
duable  old  Roman  1" 

But  alas !  there  came  before  long  news  of  the  old  Ro- 
man which  could  not  but  make  those  who  loved  and  hon- 
oured him  regret  that  he  had  not  succumbed  earlier  to  the 
common  lot.  Of  all  Landor's  wild  collisions  with  the  world 
of  fact,  the  most  melancholy  and  the  most  notorious  befel 
him  now  in  his  patriarchal  age.  In  1856,  the  year  of  the 
Letter  to  Emerson  and  the  Scenes  from  the  Study,  he  had 
paid  one  of  his  now  infrequent  visits  to  London ;  had 
joined  a  party  of  friends  at  the  Crystal  Palace,  and  been 
as  vigorous  and  as  whimsical  in  his  talk  as  ever.  From 
about  the  beginning  of  the  next  year,  1857,  there  seemed 
to  be  coming  over  him  a  change  for  the  worse.  His  let- 
ters bespoke  both  physical  decay  and  mental  disturbance. 
Worse  followed ;  it  was  found  that  he  had  allowed  him- 
self to  be  dragged  headlong  into  a  miserable  and  compro- 
mising quarrel  between  two  ladies  at  Bath.  One  of  these 
was  the  wife  of  a  clergyman,  the  other  a  young  girl,  het 
bosom  friend  until  the  quarrel  arose ;  both  had  been  very 
intimate  with  Landor  during  the  last  few  years.  To  the 
younger  he,  with  his  royal  and  inveterate  love  of  giving, 
had  lately  made  over  a  small  legacy  in  money,  which  had 
been  left  him  as  a  token  of  friendship  by  Kenyon.  In 
the  course  of  the  quarrel  the  elder  lady,  who  had  shortly 
before  accepted  help  from  the  younger  out  of  Landor's 
gift,  took  exception  to  the  nature  of  her  intimacy  with  the 
giver.  Landor,  on  his  part,  utterly  lost  control  of  himself. 
Regarding  himself  as  the  champion  of  innocent  youth 
against  an  abominable  combination  of  fraud  and  calumny, 
in  the  frenzy  of  his  indignant  imagination  he  remembered 

or  invented  all  kinds  of  previous  malpractices  against  the 
37 


204  LANDOR.  [chap. 

foe.     He  betook  himself  to  his  old  insane  weapons,  and 
both  in  print  and  writing  launched  invectives  against  her 
in  an  ultra-Roman  taste.     He  wrote  odious  letters  to  her 
husband.     Legal  steps  being  set  on  foot  to  restrain  him, 
his  unfailing  friend  Forster  came  down  to  see  what  could 
be  done.     By  his  persuasions,  joined  to  those  of  Landor's 
own  lawyers,  the  enraged  old  man  was  with  diflficulty  in- 
duced to  sign  an  apology,  coupled  with  an  undertaking 
not  to  repeat  his  offence.     But  Mr.  Forster  had  felt,  at 
the  time  when  this  engagement  was  made,  that  Landor 
could  hardly  be  trusted  to  remember  or  observe  it.     Age, 
illness,  and  indignation  had  rendered  him  for  the  time 
being  uncontrollable  and  irresponsible.     For  the  first  time 
in  more  than  twenty  years  he  proceeded  to  act  in  defiance 
of  Mr.  Forster's  advice  in  a  matter  of  publication.     Hav- 
ing recovered  from  the  hostile  party  in  the  dispute  a  num- 
ber of  scraps  in  verse,  the  least  considered  and  least  valu- 
able that  he  had  thrown  off  during  recent  years,  he  entrust- 
ed them  to  an  Edinburgh  house  to  be  sent  to  press,  under 
the  plea  that  copies  of  them  were  abroad,  and  would  be 
made  public  by  others  if  not  by  himself.     The  volume  ap- 
peared early  in  1858,  under  the  title  Dry  Sticks,  fagoted  hy 
W.  S.  Landor ;  "  by  the  late  W.  S.  Landor,"  the  old  man 
had  at  first  insisted  that  the  title  should  run.     The  book 
was  made  up  of  the  recovered  scraps  and  epigrams  in  ques- 
tion ;  with  a  few  others  in  Latin ;  besides  a  reprint,  after 
an  *'  occultation,"  as  Landor  put  it,  "  of  sixty  years,"  of 
the  Poems  from  the  Arabic  and  Persian;  and  a  number  of 
complimentary  pieces  addressed  by  various  writers  to  him- 
self.   Unhappily  the  old  man  had  not  been  able  to  restrain 
himself  from  adding  also,  in  defiance  of  his  signed  engage- 
ment, one  or  two  of  his  worst  lampoons  against  his  enemy. 
The  enemy  seems  to  have  been  nothing  loth  to  take  ad- 


vn."I  DRY  STICKS.  205 

vantage  of  the  fault,  and  a  suit  for  damages  was  immedi- 
ately set  on  foot.  Before  it  came  on  Landor  had  a  stroke 
which  left  him  insensible  for  forty -eight  hours,  and  for 
some  weeks  afterwards  he  hung  between  life  and  death. 
His  extraordinary  strength,  however,  carried  him  through, 
and  he  came  to  himself  better  both  in  body  and  mind  after 
his  illness.  The  trial  was  in  the  meantime  coming  on  at 
the  August  assize.  Practically  there  could  be  no  defence ; 
the  attacks  were  on  the  face  of  them  libellous,  and  Lan- 
der's friends  advised  him  to  go  abroad,  in  order  if  possi- 
ble to  protect  himself  against  the  consequences  of  the  in- 
evitable verdict ;  first  selling  his  personal  property  and 
pictures,  and  making  a  formal  transfer  of  all  his  real  prop- 
erty to  his  eldest  son.  This  was  accordingly  done,  and 
just  before  the  trial  came  on  the  forlorn  old  man  set  out 
to  leave  his  native  land  once  more. 


CHAPTER  YiU. 

SECOND    EXILE    AND    LAST    DAYS HEROIC    IDYLS — DEATH. 

[1858—1864.] 

On  his  way  to  the  Continent,  Landor  arrived  suddenly  at 
Mr.  Forster's  house,  where  Dickens  and  some  others  were 
at  dinner.  Dickens  left  the  table  to  see  him,  expecting 
naturally  to  find  him  broken  and  cast  down.  But  the  old 
man's  thoughts  were  far  away ;  he  seemed  as  though  no 
ugly  or  infuriating  realities  had  any  existence  for  him,  and 
sat  talking  in  his  most  genial  vein,  principally  about  Latin 
poetry.  *'  I  would  not  blot  him  out,  in  his  tender  gallant- 
ry, as  he  sat  upon  his  bed  at  Forster's  that  night,  for  a 
million  of  wild  mistakes  at  eighty-four  years  of  age ;"  so 
wrote  the  manly-hearted  and  understanding  witness  who 
then  saw  Landor  for  the  last  time.  This  was  on  the  12th 
of  July,  1858.  The  trial  came  on  at  Gloucester  in  the  next 
month,  and  the  jury  brought  in  a  verdict  of  1000/.  damages 
against  the  defendant. 

Stricken  but  unsubdued,  his  strength  and  his  intellectual 
faculties  even  in  some  slight  degree  restored,  Landor  had 
in  the  meantime  travelled  as  far  as  Genoa,  where  it  was  his 
intention  to  take  up  his  abode.  Advice  well  meant  but 
injudicious  prevailed  on  him  to  change  his  plan.  He 
pushed  on  to  Fiesole,  and  rejoined  his  family  in  the  villa 
which  he  had  once  loved  so  well,  and  which  it  was  just 
three  and  twenty  years  ago  since  he  had  left.     At  first  he 


CHAP,  vin.]       SECOND  EXILE  AND  LAST  DAYS.  207 

received  some  degree  of  contentment  and  even  pleasure 
from  his  return  to  his  old  Italian  home ;  and  it  is  affecting 
to  read  the  verses  in  which  the  old  man's  sense  of  dignity 
and  high  desert  struggles  invincibly  with  the  conscious- 
ness of  his  humiliation,  and  he  endeavours  to  find  in  the 
charm  of  his  present  surroundings  a  consolation  for  Ma 
late  disasters : 

"  If  I  extoU'd  the  virtuous  and  the  wise, 
The  brave  and  beautiful,  and  well  discern'd 
Their  features  as  they  fixt  their  eyes  on  mine. 
If  I  have  won  a  kindness  never  wooed, 
Could  I  foresee  that .  .  .  fallen  among  thieves, 
Despoil'd,  halt,  wounded  .  .  .  tramping  traffickers 
Should  throw  their  dirt  upon  me,  not  without 
Some  small  sharp  pebbles  carefully  inclosed  ? 
However,  from  one  crime  they  are  exempt ; 
They  do  not  strike  a  brother,  striking  me. 

This  breathes  o'er  me  a  cool  serenity. 
O'er  me  divided  from  old  friends,  in  lands 
Pleasant,  if  aught  without  old  friends  can  please, 
Where  round  their  lowly  turf-built  terraces 
Grey  olivfs  twinkle  in  this  wintery  sun. 
And  crimson  light  invests  yon  quarried  cliff, 
And  central  towers  from  distant  villas  peer 
Until  Arezzo's  ridges  intervene." 

But  these  consolations  were  not  destined  to  endure. 
Landor's  fate  had  still  fresh  trials  in  reserve.  The  scandal 
of  the  Bath  affair  made  some  of  his  old  friends  in  Florence 
look  coldly  on  him,  and  among  them  the  English  minister, 
Lord  Normanby.  At  this  the  old  man  was  wounded  io 
the  quick ;  and  if  the  whole  case  were  not  so  deeply  melau' 
choly,  we  might  well  smile  at  the  majestic  document  in 
which  he  presently  relieved  his  feelings : 

"  My  Lord, — Now  I  am  recovering  from  an  illness  of  several 


208  LANDOR.  [chap. 

months'  duration,  aggravated  no  little  by  your  lordship's  rude  recep- 
tion of  me  at  the  Cascine,  in  presence  of  my  family  and  innumerable 
Florentines,  I  must  remind  you  in  the  gentlest  terms  of  the  occur- 
rence. 

"  We  are  both  of  us  old  men,  my  lord,  and  are  verging  on  decrepi- 
tude and  imbecility,  else  my  note  might  be  more  energetic.  I  am 
not  inobservant  of  distinctions.  You  by  the  favour  of  a  minister  are 
Marquis  of  Normanby,  I  by  the  grace  of  God  am 

"Walter  Savage  Landor." 

But  worse  than  any  slight  inflicted  by  a  minister  were 
the  crosses  which  Landor  found  that  he  had  to  endure  at 
home.  Time  had  done  nothing  to  diminish,  but  rather 
everything  to  increase,  the  incompatibilities  between  him- 
self and  those  of  his  household.  By  settlement,  deed  of 
gift,  deed  of  transfer,  or  otherwise,  Landor  had  now  made 
over  all  his  property  to  his  wife  and  children — the  bulk  of 
it  to  his  eldest  son — and  except  for  a  small  sum  in  ready 
money  which  he  had  brought  with  him,  he  was  absolutely 
dependent  upon  his  family  for  the  means  of  subsistence. 
Doubtless  he  was  a  wilful  and  unmanageable  inmate  in  the 
house  to  which  he  had  so  long  been  a  stranger.  None  the 
less  was  it  the  obvious  duty  of  those  nearest  him,  and  en- 
riched at  his  expense,  either  to  make  his  life,  at  whatever 
cost  of  compliance  and  forbearance,  endurable  to  him  un- 
der their  common  roof,  or  else  to  provide  him  with  the 
means  of  living  in  his  own  way  elsewhere.  It  seems  only 
too  certain  that  they  made  no  serious  or  patient  attempt 
to  do  the  former;  and  the  latter,  when  Landor  desired  it, 
they  declined  to  do.  Pathetic,  almost  tragic,  was  the  por- 
tion of  the  old  man  in  those  days,  a  Lear  who  found  no 
kindness  from  his  own.  Thrice  he  left  the  villa  with  the 
determination  to  live  by  himself  in  Florence ;  but  his  wish 
was  not  indulged,  and  thrice  he  was  brought  back  to  the 
home  which  was  no  home  for  him,  and  where  he  was  dealt 


Till.]  SECOND  EXILE  AND  LAST  DAYS.  209 

with  neither  generously  nor  gently.  The  fourth  time  he 
presented  himself  in  the  house  of  Mr.  Browning  with  only 
a  few  pauls  in  his  pocket,  declaring  that  nothing  should  ever 
induce  him  to  return. 

Mr.  Browning,  an  interview  with  the  family  at  the  villa 
having  satisfied  him  that  reconciliation  or  return  was  in- 
deed past  question,  put  himself  at  once  in  communication 
with  Mr.  Forster  and  with  Landor's  brothers  in  England. 
The  latter  instantly  undertook  to  supply  the  needs  of 
their  eldest  brother  during  the  remainder  of  his  life. 
Thenceforth  an  income  suflBcient  for  his  frugal  wants  was 
forwarded  regularly  for  his  use  through  the  friend  who 
had  thus  come  forward  at  his  need.  To  Mr.  Browning's 
respectful  and  judicious  guidance  Landor  showed  himself 
docile  from  the  first.  Removed  from  the  inflictions,  real 
and  imaginary,  of  his  life  at  Fiesole,  he  became  another 
man,  and  at  times  still  seemed  to  those  about  him  like  the 
old  Landor  at  his  best.  It  was  in  July,  1859,  that  the 
new  arrangements  for  his  life  were  made.  The  remainder 
of  that  summer  he  spent  at  Siena,  first  as  the  guest  of 
Mr.  Story,  the  American  sculptor  and  poet,  next  in  a  cot- 
tage rented  for  him  by  Mr.  Browning  near  his  own.  In 
the  autumn  of  the  same  year  Landor  removed  to  a  set 
of  apartments  in  the  Via  Nunziatina  in  Florence,  close  to 
the  Casa  Guidi,  in  a  house  kept  by  a  former  servant  of 
Mrs.  Browning's,  an  Englishwoman  married  to  an  Italian. 
Here  he  continued  to  live  during  the  five  years  that  yet 
remained  to  him.'  He  was  often  susceptible,  querulous, 
unreasonable,  and  full  of  imaginings.  The  Bath  trial  and 
its  consequences  pressed  upon  his  mind  with  a  sense  of 
bewildering  injury  which  at  times  stung  him  almost  to 
madness.  The  deed  of  transfer  to  his  eldest  son  had  on 
appeal  been  in  so  far  practically  set  aside  that  the  damages 
10 


210  LAJS^DOR.  [CHAP. 

awarded  by  the  jury  had  after  all  to  be  paid.  Landor 
was  always  scheming  how  he  might  clear  his  character  by 
establishing  the  true  facts  of  the  case ;  that  is  to  say,  by 
repeating  the  self-same  charges  the  publication  of  which 
had  already  cost  him  so  much.  He  caused  a  "vindica- 
tion" to  be  printed,  and  wrote  pressing  Mr.  Forster  to 
help  him  to  get  it  made  public.  When  his  instances  to 
this  effect  were  received  with  silence  or  remonstrance,  he 
imagined  grievances  against  even  that  proved  and  devoted 
friend,  and  suspended  communications  with  him  for  a 
time.  The  delay  which  ensued  in  the  issue  of  a  new  edi- 
tion of  his  Hellenics,  prepared  partly  before  he  left  Eng- 
land and  partly  while  he  was  still  at  Fiesole,  exasperated 
him  much  as  similar  delays  had  exasperated  him  of  old, 
and  led,  as  of  old,  to  the  burning,  in  a  moment  of  irrita- 
tion, of  a  quantity  of  literary  materials  that  lay  by  him. 

Notwithstanding  all  these  private  self-tormentings  and 
indignant  lashings  of  the  wounded  lion  in  his  retreat,  he 
remained  to  his  small  circle  of  friends  and  visitors  in 
Florence  a  figure  the  most  venerable  and  the  most  impres- 
sive. Although  weaker  in  all  ways,  he  retained  all  his 
ancient  distinction,  and  many  of  his  ancient  habits.  He 
had  found  a  successor  to  Pomero  in  the  shape  of  another 
dog  of  the  same  breed  which  had  been  given  him  by  Mr. 
Story.  The  name  of  this  new  pet  was  Giallo,  and  Giallo 
became  to  Landor's  last  days  all  that  Pomero  had  been 
before.  Landor,  who  in  the  first  two  or  three  of  these  years 
at  Florence  still  contrived  to  walk  to  a  moderate  extent, 
became  known  to  the  new  generation  of  Florentines  as  the 
old  man  with  the  beautiful  dog,  il  vecchio  con  quel  bel 
canino.  He  frequented  too,  again,  his  old  haunts  among 
the  picture-dealers,  and  bought  out  of  his  slender  pittance 
almost  as  many  bad  pictures  as  of  yore.     The  occasional 


VIII.]  SECOND  EXILE  AND  LAST  DAYS.  211 

society  and  homage  of  some  old  friends  and  some  new 
prevented  his  life  from  being  too  solitary.  The  death  of 
Mrs.  Browning  in  1861,  and  her  husband's  consequent 
departure  for  England,  took  away  from  him  his  best 
friends  of  all.  He  had  found  also  a  great  pleasure  in  the 
society  of  a  young  American  lady,  Miss  Kate  Field,  who 
has  given  us  an  affectionate  portrait  of  the  old  man  in 
these  declining  days.  Almost  toothless  now,  and  partially 
deaf,  his  appearance  was  changed  by  the  addition  of  a 
flowing  and  snow-white  beard.  This,  every  one  said,  made 
him  look  more  like  an  old  lion  than  ever,  and  he  liked,  as 
he  had  always  liked,  to  be  reminded  of  the  resemblance. 
He  could  still  be  royal  company  when  he  pleased.  He 
taught  his  young  American  friend  Latin,  and  opened  out 
for  her  with  delight  the  still  abundant  treasures  of  his 
mind.  His  memory  for  new  friends,  and  for  names  in 
general,  as  well  as  for  recent  events,  had  become  uncertain  ; 
but  his  remoter  recollections,  his  stories,  as  he  used  to  call 
them,  "  of  the  year  one,"  were  as  vivid  and  full  of  power 
as  ever.  It  produced  upon  his  hearers  an  effect  almost  of 
awe  to  listen  to  this  heroic  survivor  of  another  age,  whose 
talk,  during  the  last  ministry  of  Lord  Palmerston,  and  on 
the  eve  of  the  American  war  of  Secession,  would  run  on 
things  which  he  remembered  under  the  first  ministry  of 
Pitt,  or  as  a  child  during  the  American  war  of  Indepen- 
dence. Garibaldi  was  the  hero  of  his  old  age  as  Washing- 
ton had  been  the  hero  of  his  youth.  He  followed  with 
passionate  interest  the  progress  of  Italian  emancipation. 
He  insisted  one  day  that  his  watch  should  be  pawned  and 
the  proceeds  given  to  the  fund  in  aid  of  Garibaldi's  wound- 
ed. He  was  more  indignant  than  ever  with  his  old  ac- 
quaintance, the  French  Emperor,  for  his  treacherous  deal- 
ings with  the  Italian  nation.     He  wrote  political  epigrams 


212  LANDOR.  [chap. 

in  English  and  political  odes  in  Latin  ;  an  address  in  Eng- 
lish to  the  Sicilians ;  and,  in  far  from  faultless  Italian,  a 
dialogue  between  Savonarola  and  the  Prior  of  St.  Mark's 
— the  proceeds  to  go,  as  the  watch  had  only  been  prevent- 
ed by  the  care  of  his  friends  from  going,  for  the  benefit 
of  Garibaldi's  wounded. 

In  these  days  the  books  which  the  old  man  liked  best 
to  read  were  novels,  and  he  got  from  the  library  and  read 
with  delight  some  of  those  of  Trollope  and  of  his  old 
friend  G.  P.  R.  James,  speaking  and  writing  of  the  latter 
in  particular  with  an  extravagant  partiality  of  praise.  He 
would  often  talk  of  books,  and  of  the  technical  matters  of 
language  and  the  literary  art,  with  all  his  old  mastery  and 
decision.  On  such  points  he  was  much  given  to  quoting 
the  opinion  of  his  dog  Giallo.  Giallo,  he  said,  was  the 
best  of  critics  as  well  as  the  most  delightful  of  companions, 
and  it  was  not  "  I,"  but  ''  Giallo  and  I,"  who  paid  visits 
or  entertained  views  on  politics  and  literature.  Giallo 
was  the  subject  of  many  verses,  extemporary  and  other. 
"  Why,  Giallo,"  said  the  old  man  one  day, "  your  nose  is 

hot, 

"  But  he  is  foolish  who  supposes 

Dogs  are  ill  that  have  hot  noses." 

Here  are  some  unpublished  lines  of  great  feeling,  written 
on  the  same  theme,  which  I  find  under  date  of  Aug.  1, 1860 : 

"  Giallo !  I  shall  not  see  thee  dead, 
Nor  raise  a  stone  above  thy  head, 
For  I  shall  go,  some  years  before, 
Where  thou  wilt  leap  at  me  no  more, 
Nor  bark,  as  now,  to  make  me  mind, 
Asking  me,  am  I  deaf  or  blind. 
No,  Giallo,  but  I  shall  be  soon, 
And  thou  wilt  scratch  my  turf  and  moan." 


TUi.]  SECOND  EXILE  AND  LAST  DAYS.  213 

Humorous  denunciations  of  modern  slano-  and  modern 
ill -manners  formed  also  a  considerable  part  of  Landor's 
talk  in  these  days.  His  own  manners  remained,  while 
strength  was  left,  as  fine  as  ever.  He  was  full  of  beauti- 
ful complimentary  speeches,  of  quick  and  graceful  retorts, 
of  simple  old-fashioned  presents  and  attentions.  He  would 
always  see  his  lady  friends  to  the  door,  and  help  them 
into  their  carriage  bare-headed.  If  he  accompanied  them, 
as  he  sometimes  did,  on  their  drives,  he  would  always 
take  his  place  on  the  back  seat.  One  day  they  were 
deeply  touched  by  his  expression  of  a  wish  to  drive  up  to 
the  gate  of  the  Fiesolan  villa,  and  by  the  look  of  wistful- 
ness  which  came  over  his  noble  aged  face  as  he  sat  in  si- 
lence, gazing  at  that  alienated  home  for  the  last  time. 

His  American  friends  before  long  departed  too,  and  the 
old  man  was  left  with  less  company  than  ever,  except  that 
of  Giallo,  and  of  his  own  thoughts  and  memories.  He 
continued  at  intervals  to  take  pleasure  in  the  society  of 
Mr.  Robert  (now  Earl)  Lytton,  and  in  that  of  the  son  of 
his  old  friend  Francis  Hare,  to  whom  he  had  been  full  of 
kindness  and  of  attention  throughout  his  boyhood.  Lit- 
tle by  little  the  fire  of  life  sank  lower  in  him.  He  grew 
deafer  and  deafer,  so  that  at  last  the  visits  of  his  old 
friend  Kirkup,  now  also  deaf,  almost  ceased  to  give  him 
pleasure.  He  suffered  more  and  more  from  cough,  dizzi- 
ness, and  disinclination  for  food.  He  became  less  and 
less  conscious  of  outward  and  present  facts,  or  conscious 
of  them  only  for  moments  of  brief  and  half -bewilder- 
ed awakening.  His  letters  of  these  years  are  short,  and 
more  abrupt  than  ever,  though  each  proposition  they  con- 
tain, no  matter  how  trivial  its  subject,  is  generally  as  vig- 
orous and  as  stately  in  form  as  of  old.  From  1861  to 
1863  Mr.  Browning  was  Landor's  principal  correspondent. 


214  LANDOR.  [chap. 

In  the  last  year  of  his  life  he  ceased  to  remember  his  un- 
reasonable grievance  against  Mr.  Forster,  and  wrote  to 
him  with  all  his  old  warmth  and  gratefulness  of  affection, 
expressly  confirming,  among  other  things,  the  choice  by 
which  he  had  long  ago  designated  him  as  his  biographet 
and  literary  executor. 

In  his  inward  life  and  the  customary  operations  of  his 
mind,  Landor  continued  almost  to  the  last  to  retain  an 
astonishing  and  unquenchable  vigour.  He  was  continual^ 
ly  taking  up  pen  and  paper  in  the  old  sudden  way  to  put 
down  fragments  that  he  had  been  composing,  whether  in 
verse  or  prose,  in  English  or  in  Latin.  "  I  am  sometimes 
at  a  loss  for  an  English  word,"  he  said  to  a  friend  about 
this  time,  "  never  for  a  Latin."  Two  volumes  of  his  writ- 
ing, chiefly  in  verse,  appeared  after  his  return  to  Italy. 
The  first  of  these,  long  delayed  in  the  press,  was  a  second 
and  enlarged  edition  of  the  Hellenics  of  1847.  Of  the 
idyls  contained  in  the  earlier  edition  the  majority  here 
appear  again,  some  having  been  completely  re -written, 
that  is  to  say  re-translated,  from  the  original  Latin,  in  the 
interval.  One  or  two  pieces  which  appeared  in  the  old 
volume  are  omitted,  and  among  those  introduced  for  the 
first  time  are  several  Greek  scenes  and  idyls,  including 
metrical  versions  of  two  of  his  former  prose  dialogues, 
Achilles  and  Helena,  and  Peleus  and  Thetis,  and  one  of 
two  pieces  not  belonging  to  the  Greek  cycle  at  all.  The 
old  dedication  to  Pio  Nono  is  replaced  by  one  to  Sif 
William  Napier,  and  this  is  followed  by  a  graceful  invo- 
cation to  the  Muses  to  "  come  back  home  " — home,  that 
is,  from  less  congenial  haunts  to  the  scenes  and  the  mem- 
ories of  Hellas.  On  the  whole,  this  edition  of  the  Hel- 
lenics is  neither  in  form  nor  in  substance  an  improvement 
of  that  in  1847.     It  was  four  years  later  that  there  ap- 


viu.]  HEROIC  IDYLS.  215 

peared  Landor's  next,  and  last,  volume,  the  Heroic  Idyls. 
In  the  interval  lie  had  contributed  two  or  three  prose 
dialogues  to  the  Athenceum.  The  Heroic  Idyls  is  a  vol- 
ume entirely  of  verse,  about  four  parts  English  and  one 
part  Latin.  Besides  a  number  of  personal  and  occasional 
pieces,  some  written  recently,  and  many  long  ago,  in  Lan- 
dor's usual  vein  between  epigrammatic  trifling  and  tender 
gravity,  there  are  in  this  volume  some  half-a-dozen  new 
dialogues  or  dramatic  scenes  in  verse,  of  which  Theseus 
and  Hippolyta,  and  the  Trial  of  ^schylus,  are  among 
Landor's  very  best  work  in  this  kind.  Here,  from  the 
dialogue  of  the  Amazonian  Queen  and  her  Athenian  van- 
quisher, is  an  example  of  the  poetry  which  the  old  man 
was  still  capable  of  writing  at  eighty-eight : 

^'■TTieseus.  My  country  shall  be  thine,  and  there  thy  state 

Regal. 
Hippolyta.  Am  I  a  child  ?  give  me  my  own, 

And  keep  for  weaker  heads  thy  diadems. 
Thermodon  I  shall  never  see  again, 
Brightest  of  rivers,  into  whose  clear  depth 
My  mother  plunged  me  from  her  warmer  breast, 
And  taught  me  early  to  divide  the  waves 
With  arms  each  day  more  strong,  and  soon  to  chase 
And  overtake  the  father  swan,  nor  heed 
His  hoarser  voice  or  his  uplifted  wing." 

Let  us  only  add  from  the  Heroic  Idyls  a  few  lines  of 
its  brief  preface,  turned  with  Landor's  old  incomparable 
air  of  temperate  and  dignified  self-assurance — 

"  He  who  is  within  two  paces  of  his  ninetieth  year  may  sit  down 
and  make  no  excuses ;  he  must  be  unpopular,  he  never  tried  to 
be  much  otherwise ;  he  never  contended  with  a  contemporary,  but 
walked  alone  on  the  far  eastern  uplands,  meditating  and  remem- 
bering." 


216  LANDOR.  [chap.  vin. 

The  Heroic  Idyls  appeared  in  the  autumn  of  1863, 
with  a  dedication  to  Mr.  Edward  Twisleton,  to  whom  Lan- 
dor  had  a  few  months  before  entrusted  the  manuscript  of 
the  volume  to  be  brought  home.  The  society  of  this  ac- 
complished scholar  and  amiable  gentleman  was  almost  the 
last  in  which  Landor  was  able  to  take  pleasure.  From  the 
beginning  of  1864  his  infirmities  of  all  kinds  increased 
upon  him.  Even  after  the  publication  of  the  Heroic 
Tdyls  he  had  sent  home  a  new  batch  of  five  short  dia- 
logues in  prose  and  verse.  But  the  end  was  now  fast 
approaching.  In  the  mid-spring  of  his  eighty-ninth  year 
(1864)  he  was  still  able  to  take  a  momentary  pleasure  and 
interest  in  the  visit  of  the  young  English  poet,  Mr.  Swin- 
burne, already  the  most  ardent  of  his  admirers,  and  soon 
to  become  the  most  melodious  of  his  panegyrists,  who  had 
made  a  pilgrimage  to  Florence  on  purpose  to  see  the  old 
man's  face  before  he  died.  Except  for  such  transitory 
awakenings,  Landor  had  sunk  by  the  summer  of  1864  into 
almost  complete  unconsciousness  of  external  things.  He 
could  still  call  his  faculties  about  him  for  a  few  minutes, 
to  write  fragments  of  verse,  or  short  notes  to  Mr.  Brown- 
ing or  Mr.  Forster,  but  these  notes  are  often  incoherent 
and  interrupted.  During  these  last  months  his  two 
youngest  sons  came  down  from  the  villa,  and  tended  with 
kindness  the  closing  hours  of  their  father.  About  the 
middle  of  September  the  throat  trouble  from  which  he 
had  long  suffered  brought  on  a  difficulty  in  swallowing. 
He  refused  to  take  nourishment,  and  sank,  after  three 
days'  abstinence,  in  a  fit  of  coughing,  on  the  l7th  Septem- 
ber, 1864. 

And  so  the  indomitable  spirit  was  spent  at  last,  and  the 
old  lion  was  at  rest. 


CHAPTER  IX. 

CONCLUSION. 

"I  NEVER  did  a  single  wise  thing  in  the  whole  course  of 
my  existence,  although  I  have  written  many  which  have 
been  thought  such,"  reflects  Landor,  in  one  of  the  scrawled 
and  fugitive  confessions  of  his  last  years.  Lander's  power 
lay,  in  truth,  not  in  doing,  but  in  thinking  and  saying. 
His  strength  was  not  in  the  management  of  life,  but  in  the 
creative  and  critical  operations  of  the  mind.  Of  all  men 
who  ever  lived,  none  furnishes  a  more  complete  type  of 
what  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold,  in  speaking  of  Dante,  calls 
"  the  born  artist,  the  born  solitary ;"  the  man  to  be  judged 
not  by  his  acts  but  by  his  utterances.  Or,  if  we  are  to 
judge  these  unpractical  spirits  by  their  acts  also,  by  their 
outward  as  well  as  by  their  inward  manifestations,  then  the 
test  which  we  apply  must  be  the  test  not  of  success,  but  of 
intention.  It  is  not  in  their  nature  to  be  successful ;  it 
was  in  Landor's  nature  least  of  all.  Dashed  by  his  vol- 
canic temperament  and  his  blinding  imagination  into  col- 
lision with  facts,  he  suffered  shipwreck  once  and  again. 
But  if  we  apply  to  his  character  and  career  the  measure  v^ 
not  of  results,  but  of  intention,  we  shall  acknowledge  in 
Landor  a  model  on  the  heroic  scale  of  many  noble  and 
manly  virtues.  He  had  a  heart  infinitely  kind  and  tender. 
Hil?  generosity  was  royal,  delicate,  never  hesitating.  In 
P    10* 


218  LANDOR.  [chap. 

his  pride  there  was  no  moroseness,  in  his  independence 
not  a  shadow  of  jealousy.  From  spite,  meanness,  or  un- 
charitableness  he  was  utterly  exempt.  He  was  loyal  and 
devoted  in  friendship,  and,  what  is  rare,  at  least  as  prone 
to  idealize  the  virtues  of  his  friends  as  the  vices  of  his 
enemies.  Quick  as  was  his  resentment  of  a  slight,  his 
fiercest  indignations  were  never  those  which  he  conceived 
on  personal  grounds,  but  those  with  which  he  pursued  an 
injustice  or  an  act  of  cruelty ;  nor  is  there  wanting  an  ele- 
ment of  nobleness  and  chivalry  in  even  the  wildest  of  his 
breaches  with  social  custom.  He  was  no  less  a  worshipper 
of  true  greatness  than  he  was  a  despiser  of  false.  He 
hated  nothing  but  tyranny  and  fraud,  and  for  those  his 
hatred  was  implacable.  His  bearing  under  the  conse- 
quences of  his  own  impracticability  was  of  an  admirable 
courage  and  equanimity.  True,  he  did  not  learn  by  expe- 
rience; but  then  neither  did  he  repine  at  misfortune. 
Another  man,  conscious  of  his  intentions,  and  reaping  the 
reward  he  reaped,  would  have  never  ceased  to  complain. 
Landor  wore  a  brave  face  always,  and  after  a  catastrophe 
counted  up,  not  his  losses,  but  his  consolations,  his  "  felici- 
ties," reckoning  among  them  even  that  sure  symptom  of 
a  wholesome  nature,  the  constant  pleasantness  of  his  night- 
ly dreams.  There  is  a  boyishness  about  his  outbreaks  from 
first  to  last.  At  the  worst,  he  is  like  a  kind  of  gigan- 
tic and  Olympian  schoolboy;  a  nature  passionate,  unteach- 
able,  but  withal  noble,  courageous,  loving-hearted,  bountiful, 
wholesome  and  sterling  to  the  heart's  core. 

But  it  is  the  work  and  not  the  life  of  a  man  Hke  Lan- 
dor which  in  reality  most  concerns  us.  In  his  work,  then, 
as  it  seems  to  me,  Landor  is  a  great  and  central  artist  in 
his  mother  tongue,  and  a  great  creative  master  of  historic 
sentiment  and  of  the  human  heart.     He  is  at  the  same 


IX.]  CONCLUSION.  219 

time  a  great  critic — I  use  the  word  in  its  natural  sense, 
the  sense  in  which  criticism  is  distinguished  from  creation 
— a  great  critic  of  life ;  a  masterly,  if  occasionally  capri- 
cious, critic  of  literature;  a  striking,  if  impulsive  and  im- 
petuous, critic  of  history  and  government. 

The  causes  of  his  scant  popularity  are  not  diflBcult  to 
discern.  His  thoughts  were  not  of  a  nature  especially  to 
stir  his  own  or  any  one  time.  He  was,  indeed,  the  son  of 
his  age  in  his  passion  for  liberty,  and  in  his  spirit  of  hu- 
manity and  tenderness  for  the  dumb  creation ;  and  his 
imaginative  instinct  and  imaginative  longings  in  the  di- 
rection of  ancient  Hellas  were  shared  by  the  general  Eu- 
ropean culture  of  his  time.  But  for  the  rest  he  ranged, 
apart  from  the  passions  or  the  tempests  of  the  hour, 
among  the  heroic  figures  of  the  past  and  the  permanent 
facts  and  experiences  of  life.  He  '*  walked  along  the  far 
eastern  uplands,  meditating  and  remembering  ;"  and  to  the 
far  eastern  uplands  those  who  could  walk  with  him  must 
brace  themselves  to  mount.  Even'  then  there  are  difficul- 
ties arising  from  that  want  of  consideration  and  sympathy 
in  Landor  for  his  readers  of  which  I  have  spoken.  He 
sometimes  puzzles  us  for  want  of  explanations,  and  often 
fatigues  us  with  intrusive  disquisitions.  These,  however, 
are  the  imperfections  of  a  great  master,  and  the  way  to 
counteract  them  is  by  providing  the  student  with  help 
where  help  is  wanted ;  by  selection,  above  all,  and  in  the 
next  place  by  occasional  comment  or  introduction.  A 
selection  or  golden  treasury  of  Landor's  shorter  dramatic 
dialogues,  edited  with  such  helps  for  the  reader  as  I  sug- 
gest, would  be,  as  was  said  long  ago  by  Julius  Hare,  "  one 
of  the  most  beautiful  books  in  the  language,  that  is  to  say 
in  the  world."     From  the  longer,  the  discursive  dialogues, 

perhaps  the  only  selection  possible  for  popular  use  would 
88 


220  LANDOR.  [chap. 

be  one  on  the  principle  adopted  by  Mr.  Hilliard — a  selec- 
tion, that  is,  of  detached  sentences  and  sayings.     These 
form  a  kind  of  literature  in  which  England  since  the  sev- 
enteenth century  has  not  been  rich ;  and  from  the  conver- 
sations and  other  prose  writings  of  Landor  there  is  to  be 
gathered  such  an  anthology  of  them  as  the  literature  of 
France  itself  could  hardly  surpass.     If,  indeed,  there  is  any 
English  writer  who  can  be  compared  to  Pascal  for  power 
and   compression,  for  incisive  strength   and  imaginative 
breadth  together,  in  general  reflections,  and  for  the  com- 
bination of  conciseness  with  splendour  in  their  utterance, 
it  is  certainly  Landor.     Space  has  failed  me  to  illustrate 
or  do  more  than  name  this  province  of  his  genius.     The 
true  Landorian,  no  doubt,  will  prefer  to  dig  these  jewels 
for  himself  from  their  surroundings — surroundings  some- 
times attractive  and  sometimes  the  reverse ;  but  true  Lan- 
dorians  may  at  present  be  counted  on  the  fingers,  and  I 
speak  of  what  has  to  be  done  in  order  to  extend  to  wider 
circles  the  knowledge  of  so  illustrious  a  master. 

In  calling  him  a  great  artist  in  English  letters,  I  refer 
rather  to  his  prose  than  to  his  verse.  He  was  equally  at 
home,  as  I  began  by  saying,  in  both  forms,  but  it  is  in 
prose  only  that  he  is  at  his  best.  He  had  himself  no  illu- 
sions upon  this  point,  and  consistently  declared,  at  least 
after  he  had  applied  himself  to  the  Imaginary  Conversa- 
tions, that  poetry  was  his  amusement,  prose  his  proper 
study  and  business.  Again:  "The  only  thing  which 
makes  me  imagine  that  I  cannot  be  a  very  bad  poet,  is 
that  I  never  supposed  myself  to  be  a  very  good  one." 
That  which  essentially  distinguishes  poetry  from  prose  is 
the  presencp  of  two  inseparable  elements  in  just  propor- 
tion— emotion,  and  the  musical  regulation  and  control  of 
emotion.\ .'  In  the  poetry  of  Landor  the  element  of  control 


-]      J 


CONCLUSION.  221 


is  apt  to  be  in  excess ;  his  verses  are  apt  to  be  sedate  to 
the  point  of  tameness.  As  a  matter  of  critical  preference, 
indeed,  he  preferred  the  poetry  of  sobriety  and  restraint  to 
the  poetry  of  vehemence  and  of  enthusiasm.  "What  is 
there  lovely  in  poetry  unless  there  be  moderation  and  com- 
posure ?"  Well  and  good ;  but  observing  moderation  and 
composure,  it  is  still  possible  to  strike  and  to  maintain  the 
true  poetical  pitch  and  poetical  ring.  Landor  strikes  them 
often,  but  never,  as  it  seems  to  me,  maintains  them  long. 
Therefore  his  quite  short  pieces,  whether  gay  or  grave, 
pieces  that  express  a  fancy  or  an  emotion  with  neatness 
and  precision  approaching  the  epigrammatic,  and  with  mu- 
sical cadences  of  extreme  simplicity,  are,  on  the  whole,  his 
best,  'i  His  lighter  autobiographical  verses  of  all  kinds,  and 
including  those  written  at  greater  length  in  blank  verse  or 
eight-syllable  rhymes,  contain  much,  as  the  reader  will  have 
perceived  by  such  specimens  as  we  have  been  able  to  give, 
that  is  in  a  high  degree  dignified,  interesting,  and  graceful. 
In  his  loftier  flights  Landor  is  admirable  and  disappoint- 
ing by  turns.  In  high-pitched  lyrical  writing  he  will  start 
often  with  a  magnificent  movement — 

"  Not  were  that  submarine 
Gem-lighted  city  mine  " — 

and  fall  within  a  few  lines  into  a  prosaic  sedateness  both 
of  thought  and  sound.  In  high-pitched  naiTative  or  dra- 
matic writing  he  is  sometimes  more  sustained ;  but  when, 
in  verse,  Landor  becomes  sustained,  he  is  apt  also  to  be- 
come monotonous. 

But  if  Landor  is  a  poet,  so  far  as  concerns  the  form  of 
his  verse,  only  of  the  second  order,  he  is  unquestionably  a 
prose  writer  of  the  very  first.  "  Good  prose,"  he  says,  "  to 
say  nothing  of  the  original  thoughts  it  conveys,  may  be  in- 


222  LANDOR.  [chap. 

finitely  varied  in  modulation.  It  is  only  an  extension  of 
metres,  an  amplification  of  harmonies,  of  which  even  the 
best  and  most  varied  poetry  admits  but  few.'*  Landor  had 
too  rigid  and  mechanical  a  conception  of  the  laws  of  verse ; 
in  the  extended  metres  and  amplified  harmonies  of  prose 
he  was  an  extraordinary  and  a  noble  master.  There  was 
not  the  simplest  thing  but  received  in  his  manner  of  saying 
,  it  a  charm  of  sound  as  well  as  a  natural  and  grave  distinc- 
tion of  air ;  there  was  not  the  most  stupendous  in  the  say- 
ing of  which  he  ever  allowed  himself  to  lose  moderation 
or  control.  His  passion  never  hurries  him,  in  prose,  into 
the  regular  beats  or  equi-distant  accents  of  verse ;  he  ac- 
cumulates clause  upon  clause  of  towering  eloquence,  but  in 
the  last  clause  never  fails  to  plant  his  period  composedly 
and  gracefully  on  its  feet.  His  perfect  instinct  for  the 
rhythms  and  harmonies  of  prose  reveals  itself  as  fully  in 
three  lines  as  in  a  hundred.  It  is  only  a  great  master  of 
prose  who  could  have  written  this : 

"  A  bell  warbles  the  more  mellifluously  in  the  air  when  the  sound 
of  the  stroke  is  over,  and  when  another  swims  out  from  underneath 
it,  and  pants  upon  the  element  that  gave  it  birth." 

Or  this : 

"  There  are  no  fields  of  amaranth  on  this  side  of  the  grave :  there 
are  no  voices,  0  Rhodop^,  that  are  not  soon  mute,  however  tuneful : 
there  is  no  name,  with  whatever  emphasis  of  passionate  love  re- 
peated, of  which  the  echo  is  not  faint  at  last." 

But  harmony  and  rhythm  are  only  the  superficial  beau- 
ties of  a  prose  style.  Style  itself,  in  tjie  full  meaning  of 
the  word,  depends  upon  something  deeper  and  more  in- 
ward. Style  means  the  instinctive  rule,  the  innate  princi- 
ple of  selection  and  control,  by  which  an  artist  shapes  and 
regulates  every  expression  of  his  mind.     Landor  was  in 


IX,]  CONCLUSION,  223 

English  prose  an  artist  comparable  with  the  highest  in 
their  respective  spheres ;  with  Milton  in  English  verse,  or 
with  Handel  in  music.  He  was  as  far  as  possible  from 
seeking  after  or  recommending  any  of  the  qualities  gen- 
erally denoted  by  fine  writing.  So  far  as  he  sought  after 
or  recommended  anything,  it  was  the  study  of  simplicity, 
parsimony,  and  the  severest  accuracy  in  speech,  "  I  hate 
false  words,  and  seek  with  care,  diflSculty,  and  moroseness 
those  that  fit  the  thing."  '  If  Landor  is  at  times  a  magnil- 
oquent and  even  a  pompous  writer,  the  reason  is  that  his 
large  words  befit  the  largeness  of  his  thoughts  and  images, 
and  pomp  is  the  natural  expression  of  his  genius.  The 
instinct  of  dignity,  combined  with  the  study  of  simplicity 
and  directness ;  natural  majesty,  and  the  absence  of  arti- 
ficial ornament ;  these  are  the  first  characteristics  of  Lan- 
dor's  prose.  The  next  are  the  completeness  and  mutual 
independence  of  its  separate  clauses  and  periods.  His  sen- 
tences are  apt  to  stand  alone  like  his  ideas,  and  to  consist 
either  of  single  clauses,  each  giving  accurate  expression  to 
a  single  thought,  or  of  carefully  harmonized  and  adjusted 
groups  of  clauses  giving  expression  to  a  group  of  closely 
connected  and  interdependent  thoughts.  The  best  skele- 
ton type  of  a  Landorian  seniense  is  that  which  we  quoted 
some  pages  back  on  Lord  Bvron :  "  I  had  avoided  him ; 
I  had  slighted  him ;  he  knew  it ;  he  did  not  love  me ;  he 
could  not,"  No  conjunctions,  no  transitions ;  each  state- 
ment made  by  itself,  and  their  connexion  left  to  be  dis- 
cerned by  the  reader.  If  we  take  the  most  sustained  ex- 
amples of  Landor's  eloquence,  we  shall  find  in  them  so 
many  amplified  and  enriched  examples  of  the  same  meth- 
od. These  qualities  render  his  prose  an  unrivalled  vehicle 
for  the  expression  of  the  more  stable,  permanent,  massive 
order  of  ideas  and  images.     But  for  expressing  ideas  of 


224  LANDOR.  [chap.  ix. 

sequence,  whether  the  sequence  of  propositions  in  an  argu- 
ment, or  the  sequence  of  incidents  in  a  narrative,  Landor's 
style  is  less  adapted.  There  is  a  natural  analogy  between 
various  manners  of  writing  and  the  other  arts;  and  the 
ordinary  criticism  on  Landor,  that  he  seems  to  write  in 
marble,  is  true  enough.  Solidity,  beauty  and  subtlety  of 
articulation,  mass  with  grace,  and  strength  with  delicacy, 
these  are  the  qualities  which  he  obtains  to  perfection,  but 
he  obtains  them  at  the  price  of  a  certain  immobility.  He 
was  probably  right  in  belie\dng  that  he  had  imparted  to 
his  work  yet  another  of  the  qualities  of  marble — its  im- 
perishableness. 


THE    END. 


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